A 3.3-million-year-old trove of evolutionary history

A 3.3-million-year-old trove of evolutionary history
A fossilized skeleton of a 3-year-old girl, discovered in Ethiopia, possessed human and apelike features. She is the same species as the famous fossil named Lucy.
Peter Gorner, Chicago Tribune
Last update: September 21, 2006 – 12:21 AM

CHICAGO - A 3.3-million-year-old skeleton of a 3-year-old girl curled into a ball no bigger than a cantaloupe -- a unique fossil described as "a bright beam of light" on human evolution -- was unveiled Wednesday by paleontologists who found it while working in the sun-baked badlands of Ethiopia.
The tiny bundle of bones may be the best fossil yet found of the primitive human ancestor Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as the superstar fossil named Lucy, an adult female discovered nearby in 1974, a creature that lived about 100,000 years after the newfound specimen.

"I'm very excited," said Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist who led the team that discovered it. "This is a unique discovery."

Independent experts agreed, saying the skeleton's discovery would likely lead to important insights into human evolutionary history.

The skeleton, described in the British scientific journal Nature and the November issue of National Geographic magazine, represents the first juvenile remains of these ancient humanlike creatures, making the fossil the oldest child ever found.

The fossil, nicknamed "Selam," which means "peace" in several Ethiopian languages, will surely feed debate about whether this species, which walked upright, also climbed and moved through trees easily, and it offers clues about how the species blurred the line between ape and human.

From the waist down, the skeleton looks like a human's. But her upper body had such apelike features as a small brain, a flat nose and a long, projecting face. Her finger bones were curved and almost as long as a chimp's.

"Clearly, we have a species in transition," said Lucy's discoverer, Donald Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

The skeleton was discovered in 2000 in the remote, harsh Dikika area of northeastern Ethiopia. Scientists have spent five painstaking years removing the bones from sandstone, and the job will take years more to complete.

Judging by how well it was preserved, the skeleton may have come from a body that was quickly buried by sediment in a flood, the researchers said.


The Associated Press and Washington Post contributed to this report.