Discovery of Mrs. Ples

Mrs. Ples is the nickname of a well-preserved fossil skull of an early hominin found at the Sterkfontein caves near Johannesburg in South Africa by the palaeontologist Robert Broom and his colleague John Robinson. It belongs to Australopithecus africanus, a species that lived more than two million years ago and is regarded as a close relative of the ancestors of the genus Homo. The skull was first called Plesianthropus transvaalensis, from which the nickname comes, and was believed to be that of a female, although some later analyses suggest it may have been male. Together with the discovery of the Taung Child by Raymond Dart, such finds supported the idea that humans originated in Africa.

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