The Three Million Year Old Girl

This doesn't really have anything to do with sex-ed in Montgomery County, but you gotta think it's cool. They found a little Australopithecus girl who died more than three million years ago.

In The Post:

Fossil hunters have unearthed the skeleton of a young girl who died 3.3 million years ago, marking the first time scientists have discovered the nearly complete remains of a child of an ancient human ancestor.

The girl, who was about 3 years old when she perished in what may have been a flash flood, provides an unprecedented window into human evolution, in part because she belongs to the same species as "Lucy," one of the most famous hominid specimens in paleontology, experts said. 3.3 Million Years Later, Skeleton of Girl Found

Australopithecus is believed to have lived 4.4 to maybe as recently as 1.7 million years ago. Their brain was about a third the size of ours, but then they were only like four or four-and-a-half feet tall.

How do I know this? It's true I minored in Anthro, but I also got straight A's in all my Google courses.

I tell my kids stuff like that all the time, and they believe me. To them, the world was always the way it is now.

That prompted some scientists to refer to the new skeleton as "Lucy's baby," even though they estimate that the child lived about 150,000 years earlier. The researchers who discovered her in an Ethiopian desert named her Selam, which means "peace" in several Ethiopian languages.

Ah, yes, and sometime it would be fun to sit down and talk about the evolution of language, as well as species -- we do see a lot of words that look like "Selam" and mean peace, don't we?

Although scientists have found bones and bone fragments of children from this and other species of human predecessors, and a few skeletons, the discovery represents one of the most complete individuals ever recovered and by far the oldest. Bones of young children are so small and soft that few survive.
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Scientists are still painstakingly extracting the fossilized bones from the surrounding stone, but they have already made striking discoveries, dramatically reinforcing the idea that the creatures were a transitional stage between apes and humans. Although they had legs like humans that enabled them to walk upright on two feet, they also had shoulders like gorillas that may have enabled them to climb trees; although their teeth seem to have grown quickly, like chimps' teeth, their brains may have matured more slowly, like those of humans.

"This confirms the idea that human evolution was not some straight line going from ape to human," said Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution. "The more we discover, the more we realize that different parts evolve at different times, and some of these experiments of early evolution had a combination of humanlike and apelike features."

The fascinating thing is to imagine how the various changes to the human phenotype were adaptive. In a lot of cases it's clear, for instance in the shape of teeth as a function of diet, but in other cases it's not really obvious how an early change improved the fitness of the organism.

You know these ape-people didn't think of themselves as a stage on the route to development of ... Americans. These early ancestors would have experienced life as if they were the ultimate, the top of the line, and I suppose by our standards, in their day, they were.

They would have felt that all of time led inexorably and pointedly to their own lives, just like we do.

And we might sometimes wonder where it goes from here.

The youngster's fossilized remains, the first to fully exhibit the mixed ape-human characteristics in a child, were found in the remote, harsh Dikika area of northeastern Ethiopia in 2000 when an expedition member spotted the face of the skull poking out from a steep dusty hillside. The surroundings indicate that the child might have drowned in a flash flood, which immediately buried the intact remains in sand that hardened to encase the bones, the researchers said.

Over the next four years, researchers slowly recovered much of the rest of the child's skeleton, including the entire skull, with a sandstone impression of the brain, jaws with teeth, parts of the shoulder blades and collarbone, ribs, the spinal column, the right arm, fingers, legs and almost a complete left foot.

Can you imagine? Looking over and seeing that little skull looking back at you... touching someone who lived that long ago.

Where the child's throat once was, Zeresenay found a hyoid bone, which is located in the voice box and supports muscles of the tongue and throat. It is the first time that bone has been discovered in such an old fossil of a human predecessor. It appears more primitive than a human hyoid and more like those in apes, suggesting that the 1 1/2 -foot toddler sounded more like a chimp than a human.

And so you have the evolution of the speech apparatus -- and remember, evolution doesn't know where it's going, the obvious rule is that an adaptation will increase in the population if it increases the probability of reproduction. So that funky voice-box did something helpful, even if it was only grunts and yells.

"If you imagine how this child would have sounded if it was crying out for its mother, its cry would appeal more to chimp ears than to human ears," said Fred Spoor of University College London, who is helping to study the remains. "Even though it's a very early human ancestor, she would sound more apelike than humanlike."

Just chilling to think of.

The child's lower limbs confirm earlier findings that the species walked upright like humans. But the shoulder blades resemble a young gorilla's. Along with the long arms, curved fingers and inner-ear cavity, the bones provide new evidence supporting those who believe the creatures may have still climbed trees as well.

"I see this species as foraging bipeds -- walking on two feet but climbing trees when necessary, such as to forage for food," Zeresenay said, adding that more research will be needed to be certain of that controversial conclusion.
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The discovery of a child also allows scientists to begin to study how the species developed. The child's brain size suggests that the species' brain matured relatively slowly.

"If the brain was developing slower, as in humans or similar to what you see in humans, here might have also been the beginnings of behavioral shifts towards being more human," Zeresenay said.

Three million years ago.

That. Is. Cool.