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Reconstruction by John Gurche/courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History |
The famous skeleton Lucy has had a makeover, thanks to newly discovered
fossils. A reconstruction of the 3.2-million-year-old hominin emerged
Friday with a trimmer figure, showing off a distinct neck, a narrower
waistline, and arched foot. Earlier reconstructions, relying on scanty
fossil rib bones and living African apes such as chimpanzees and
gorillas, had given her a cone-shaped thorax and potbelly. That implied
that her species,
Australopithecus afarensis, had retained
adaptations for moving in the trees a lot like chimps. But in the past
few years, researchers have found additional ribs and a new foot bone of
A. afarensis. The ribs are curved, which translates to a
barrel-shaped thorax like modern humans, paleoanthropologist Carol Ward
of the University of Missouri, Columbia, showed in a
symposium
on Friday. And the foot bone shows a distinct arch. This suggests that
Lucy and her kin spent plenty of time on the ground, although they
probably still climbed and slept in trees. The reconstruction, overseen
by paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum
of Natural History and created by artist John Gurche, was
unveiled Friday as part of an exhibit on human evolution at the museum.
news.sciencemag.org
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