Mrs Ples was a cross-dresser

She's a good-looking woman, Mrs Ples, isn't she? Pity she may be adolescent boy.

X-ray analysis of the dental detail of Mrs. Ples has suggested that that Madam was what researchers call a 'sub-adult' and parents call 'teenager'. So a designation of Miss Ples or Master Ples is also possible. It's always fun when palaeontology verges on forensic television shows like CSI, isn't it?

This is some of the scandal likely to be revealed in ''Mrs Ples and our distant relatives on the African continent,'' an upcoming talk by Dr Francis Thackeray as part of African Origins Month at the MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town.

Francis, who's based at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, will introduce us to our kin, Mrs Ples, a fossil skull found half a century ago at the Sterkfontein caves in the NorthWest province.

The two sites - the museum where she now has respectful pride of place, and the cave she/he may have fallen into - are separated by 70 kilometers and about 2.6 million years of evolution.

The fossilised skull certainly dates back more than two and a half million years. The nickname comes from her/his initial scientific name Plesianthropus transvaalensis. The Latin means 'almost human from the Transvaal'.

Mrs Ples rested in obscurity until she was discovered by Robert Broom and John Robinson in 1947. Regardless of whether she is a he or a she, Mrs Ples remains the world's most complete skull of what we now know to be Australopithecus africanus. Many fossils of this species, the distant relatives of all humankind, have been found in the Sterkfontein area, below, also known as the Cradle of Humankind world heritage site.



Some experts have suggested that a partial skeleton, discovered in the same year, in the same geological deposit and near the skull, may belong with Mrs Ples. If correct, this would make Mrs. Ples the South African counterpart to the famous Lucy fossil from East Africa, and would re-ignite the simmering competition between South African and Kenyan palaeontologists.

In 2004, Mrs. Ples was voted 95th in the SABC3's Great South Africans Top 100 list. Come meet a Great (if quiet) South African: Wednesday 12 September @ 19:00

* African Origins Month is funded by the Department of Science and Technology with the assistance of SAASTA, the South African Agency for Science and Technology Awareness.