Nation & World
So Very Young...and Yet So Old
She was, maybe, 3 years old when she died. That was 3.3 million years ago, an era when our distant ancestors in Ethiopia-a species called Australopithecus afarensis-were making the transition from tree-swinging to walking around on two legs. The journal Nature last week reported the discovery of remarkably intact fossils of a young girl whose shoulder blades resembled a young gorilla's, suggesting she could climb trees, but whose legs imply she walked efficiently. The fossils are the first juvenile remains from this chapter of human evolution, making it the oldest child ever discovered. Older, too, than the famous 3.2 million-year-old fossils of "Lucy," who was in the same species, found nearby in the Ethiopian desert in 1974.
With Josh Fischman and Associated Press
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