First Family’s last stand
By Bruce Bower
From Tempe, Arizona, at a meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society
Nearly 30 years ago, excavations at Ethiopia’s Hadar site yielded the 3.2-million-year-old hominid remains of nine adults and four children who apparently met a sudden, collective demise. Researchers have since speculated that this group, unearthed in a shallow channel and dubbed the First Family by its discoverers, either drowned during a flood or died after sinking into a mucky pit.
All the fossils belong to Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as the famous partial skeleton from Hadar called Lucy.