Please accept our Best Wishes for Mother and Child.
0
An older guy has sauntered into Lucy's life, and some researchers believe he stands ready to recast much of what scientists know about the celebrated early hominid and her species.
Excavations in Ethiopia's Afar region have uncovered a 3.6-million-year-old partial male skeleton of the species Australopithecus afarensis. This is the first time since the excavation of Lucy in 1974 that paleoanthropologists have turned up more than isolated pieces of an adult from the species, which lived in East Africa from about 4 million to 3 million years ago.
A nearly complete skeleton of an A. afarensis child has been retrieved from another Ethiopian site.
Discoverers of the skeleton, led by anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, consider this a Desi Arnaz moment. As the late actor often exclaimed on his classic television show, "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!" But other researchers are not so convinced that the new fossil changes much of what they already knew about Lucy and her kind.
Haile-Selassie's team has dubbed its new find Kadanuumuu, which means "big man" in the Afar language. At an estimated 5 to 5-and-a-half feet tall, he would have towered over 3 and a half-foot-tall Lucy. Excavations between 2005 and 2008 in a part of Afar called Woranso-Mille -- about 48 kilometers north of where Lucy's 3.2-million-year-old remains were found -- yielded fossils from 32 bones of the same individual.
Big Man's long legs, relatively narrow chest and inwardly curving back denote a nearly humanlike gait and ground-based lifestyle, according to a preliminary report published online June 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lucy has often been portrayed as having had a fairly primitive two-legged gait and a penchant for tree climbing.
Source
