Andrew Harding
BBC News, Johannesburg

One of the world’s oldest and most complete skeletons of our ancient ancestors is being unveiled in Johannesburg today.

South African scientists, who have spent 20 years excavating and preparing Little Foot, say the fossilised remains are more than three million years old.

She is small, ape-like, and almost completely intact.

Scientists have been carefully extracting her from a block of ancient rock over the course of two decades.

Now Little Foot is unbound, reassembled and anxious to shake up our understanding of our own human origins.

Her exact age has been hotly disputed, but her handlers insist she’s 3.67 million years old.

That means she was alive at roughly the same time as Lucy – a different, less complete, but more famous skeleton of an ancient human relative found in East Africa.

It now looks like our family tree may be even more complicated than we thought, and spread across a much bigger chunk of this continent.

Little Foot was found in a network of caves north-west of Johannesburg – a site that has become something of a treasure trove for scientists more used to drawing big conclusions from far smaller fragments of ancient bone.

In this video, Prof Ron Clarke, from University of the Witwatersrand, explains his painstaking work to uncover the world's most complete skeleton of an Australopithecus:

Zanzibar-born artist Lubaina Himid has won the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded each year in the UK.

The 63-year-old Preston-based artist won the £25,000 ($33,500) prize for work addressing racial politics and the legacy of slavery.

She is the oldest winner and the first black woman to pick up the art award.

The judges praised her "uncompromising tackling of issues including colonial history and how racism persists today".

She told the BBC afterwards that her win probably wouldn't change people's perspectives and attitudes, but added: "I think it will get people talking, which is the point of my work."

As to what she will do with the money, she said:

Himid moved to the UK with her mother not long after her birth in Zanzibar in 1954 - 10 years before the archipelago became part of Tanzania.

In January she told the UK Guardian newspaper: “I think I was always trying to paint Zanzibar somehow. I was always trying to live it in my head, external.”

Read the BBC Arts story for more

Alex Duval Smith
BBC Africa

Image source, AFP

Hundreds of people have fled villages in western Cameroon amid a military crackdown on a secessionist movement which wants independence for the country's two English-speaking regions.

People have been arriving in the towns of Bamenda and Kumfa, with others crossing the border into Nigeria where they have relatives.

They have told BBC correspondents that they are fleeing a military offensive.

The army has not given details of its operations around Mamfe in the Manyu area, but the government had warned it would clamp down on the secessionist Ambazonia Defense Forces.

The group has boasted of killing 10 soldiers and police.

Most people in Cameroon speak French, but since last year the English-speaking minority has been demanding more rights.

The resulting violent clampdown by security forces and hundreds of arrests have only served to generate support among English speakers for breaking away from Cameroon.

Image source, NRC/Christian Jepsen

More than 5,500 people fled their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo every day during the first half of 2017, leading one charity to label the situation in the country a "mega-crisis".

The figures mean that, for the second year in a row, DR Congo is the country worst-affected by conflict displacement in the world, according to a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), external.

Fighting between armed groups added to a worsening political crisis - as President Joseph Kabila refuses to step down - has made the area particularly volatile, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) country director in DR Congo, Ulrika Blom, said.

She added:

However, despite there now being four million displaced people, as well as more than seven million struggling to feed themselves, help has been slow to materialise.

The United Nations declared its highest level emergency in October, but less than half the money needed has been received.

Ms Blom - whose colleagues have seen firsthand the "absolute squalor" of those fleeing violence were being forced to live in - said:

Today's African proverb:

Image source, LFLEMING

Click here to send your proverbs.

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