Further assessment of a ~2-million-year-old hominin pelvis (DNH 43) from Drimolen Main Quarry, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The palaeocave site of Drimolen Main Quarry (DMQ) in Gauteng Province, South Africa, has produced fossil hominin material dating to 2.04–1.95 Ma, including craniodental remains attributed to Paranthropus robustus and the earliest specimen of Homo erectus sensu lato along with numerous postcrania of uncertain taxonomic affiliation. Among this collection is a partial pelvis (DNH 43), which includes the sacrum and elements of the right os coxae. Although previously described as showing similarities to the pelvis of Australopithecus and Paranthropus, comparisons across the broader hominin fossil record have been limited and DNH 43 has never been analysed quantitatively. Here we present a partial digital reconstruction of DNH 43 and compare it to an expanded data set of fossil specimens to determine its closest morphological affinities. Overall, the quantitative analysis is congruent with qualitative results reflecting the primitive features of DNH 43, suggesting an Australopithecus/Paranthropus-like anatomy, including small absolute size, relatively small sacroiliac articulation, moderately wide tuberoacetabular sulcus, gracile acetabulosacral buttress, and obstetric dimensions that are relatively broad. A study of this rare articulated pelvis shows that the orientation of the sacrum (pelvic incidence) is similar to that of recent Homo sapiens. Although DNH 43 shares some specific metric similarities with specimens MH2 (Australopithecus sediba) and OH 28 (cf. Homo erectus), the taxonomic relevance is unclear given the poor understanding of Paranthropus and early Homo postcranial variation. Affiliation with Paranthropus robustus (which dominates the DMQ craniodental assemblage) cannot be ruled out, and we consider assignment to that taxon to be a reasonable provisional attribution.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".