Prominent South Africans dismiss new fossil find as plan to depict Africans as "subhuman"

The skeleton of Homo naledi pictured in the Wits bone vault at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on September 13, 2014. AFP

 

JOHANNESBURG: Some prominent South Africans have dismissed the discovery of a new human ancestor as a racist theory designed to cast Africans as "subhuman", an opinion that resonates in a country deeply bruised by apartheid.