Arizona State University anthropologist and Institute of Human Origins researcher Gary Schwartz, along with fellow anthropologist Dan Gebo from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, have studied fossil anklebones of some early ancestors of modern humans and discovered that they walked on the wild side.
It seems some of our earliest ancestors possessed a rather unsteady stride due to subtle anatomical differences. Schwartz and Gebo's findings will be published in the April 2006 edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, but the article is available online at www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112169244.
Schwartz and Gebo looked at seven anklebones from a variety of early human ancestors found in eastern and southern Africa and compared them to samples taken from modern humans, chimpanzees and gorillas.
Basically, the robust australo's weren't just regular australo's with bigger heads. For a long time, these things were kind of thought of as static offshoots that just eventually died out. It looks as if they're becoming an object of study in and of themselves rather than as little more than an interesting sidenote to hominin history.