Evolution’s Child: Fossil puts youthful twist on Lucy’s kind
By Bruce Bower
As fossil hunters crossed a dusty slope of Ethiopia’s Dikika region on Dec. 10, 2000, one noticed a child’s face bones poking out of the ground. Now, after years of painstaking work to remove the ancient individual’s skull and some of the other bones from sandstone, researchers have announced that this discovery represents the oldest and most complete fossil child in our evolutionary family.
The nearly complete skeleton, missing only the pelvis and a few other bones, comes from a 3-year-old Australopithecus afarensis female who died about 3.3 million years ago, say Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues.