How is lucy related to humans

Lucy's size gives her away as a female. Later fossil discoveries established that A. A number of factors point to Lucy being fully grown.

For one thing, her wisdom teeth, which were very humanlike, were exposed and appear to have been in use for a while before her death. In addition, the sections of her skull—separated in children—had grown together. The remarkably complete "Lucy's baby" skeleton, announced on September 20, , is about a hundred thousand years older than Lucy herself. The A. All rights reserved. What did Lucy look like? Why was Lucy named Lucy? How do we know Lucy was female? Was Lucy an adult? Was "Lucy's baby" really Lucy's baby?

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His subsequent expedition led to the discovery of Lucy, a 40 percent complete skeleton of a new species of hominid , now known as Australopithecus afarensis. The final piece of the puzzle was a skull from the same site, which clearly demonstrated that Lucy's kind were small-brained, although they walked upright. All rights reserved. View in: QuickTime RealPlayer. Finding Lucy: What was the crucial change that set us on the path to becoming human?

Our big brains, with their capacity for language and making complex tools, set us apart from other animals. Our ability to walk upright, freeing our hands for other purposes, also distinguishes us from other apes.

In Darwin's day, and for many decades afterwards, too few fossils had been found to solve the mystery of which came first. To many people, it seemed logical that our earliest ancestors must have been smarter than the average ape.

The first sign that there might be a different road to humanness came in the s, when Raymond Dart described the fossil skull known as the Taung child. The angle at which the child's spine had joined its skull suggested to Dart that it had walked upright, though its brain was not much bigger than that of a chimpanzee. The vertebrae show evidence of the spinal curvatures necessitated by a permanent upright stance. Evidence now strongly suggests that the Hadar material, as well as fossils from elsewhere in East Africa from the same time period, belong to a single, sexually dimorphic species known as Australopithecus afarensis.

At Hadar, the size difference is very clear, with larger males and smaller females being fairly easy to distinguish. Lucy clearly fits into the smaller group. One of the few clues we have is the conspicuous lack of postmortem carnivore and scavenger marks. Typically, animals that were killed by predators and then scavenged by other animals such as hyaenas will show evidence of chewing, crushing, and gnawing on the bones.

The ends of long bones are often missing, and their shafts are sometimes broken which enables the predator to get to the marrow. In contrast, the only damage we see on Lucy's bones is a single carnivore tooth puncture mark on the top of her left pubic bone.

This is what is called a perimortem injury, one occurring at or around the time of death. If it occurred after she died but while the bone was still fresh, then it may not be related to her death. There are several indicators which give a fair idea of her age. All the ends of her bones had fused and her cranial sutures had closed, indicating completed skeletal development.

Her vertebrae show signs of degenerative disease, but this is not always associated with older age. All these indicators, when taken together, suggest that she was a young, but fully mature, adult when she died. Because of the rare and fragile nature of many fossils, including hominids, molds are often made of the original fossils.