In the News
“ Our finds provide the earliest secure dates for copper smelting and indicate the existence of different, possibly independent centers
of invention of metallurgy. ” — THILO REHREN, PAGE 8
But critics contend ‘Big Man’
won’t end locomotion debate
the Cleveland Museum of Natural His-
tory, call their new find Kadanuumuu,
which means “big man” in the Afar lan-
guage. Excavations between 2005 and
2008 in a part of Afar called Woranso-
Mille — about 48 kilometers north of
where Lucy’s 3.2-million-year-old
remains were found — yielded fossils
from 32 of Big Man’s bones.
New fossil shows
Lucy walked tall,
discoverers say
Big Man’s long legs, relatively narrow
chest and inwardly curving back denote
a nearly humanlike gait and ground-based lifestyle, according to a paper published online June 21 in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. At
an estimated 5 to 5.5 feet tall, he would
have towered over 3.5-foot-tall Lucy,
who has often been portrayed as having
had a fairly primitive t wo-legged gait and
a penchant for tree climbing.
Big Man’s humanlike shoulder blade
differs as much from that of a chimpanzee
as it does from a gorilla’s, Haile-Selassie
says. The shape of that bone, combined
with characteristics of five recovered ribs, suggests to Haile-Selassie’s
team that Big Man’s chest was shaped
like a human’s. Earlier reconstructions
of Lucy’s rib cage had endowed her with
a chimplike, funnel-shaped chest.
So despite chimps’ close genetic relationship to people, he says, this new fossil
evidence supports the view that chimps
have evolved a great deal since their lineage diverged from humans’ roughly
7 million years ago, making them a poor
model for ancient hominids.
Big Man’s anatomy bolsters recent
analyses of 4.4-million-year-old
Ardipi-thecus ramidus, which also challenge
traditional views of ancient hominids as
chimplike (SN: 1/16/10, p. 22).
Estimates of Lucy’s build were based
By Bruce Bower
An older guy has sauntered into Lucy’s life, and some research- ers believe he stands ready to recast much of what scientists
know about the celebrated early hominid
and her species.
Excavations in Ethiopia’s Afar region
have uncovered a 3.6-million-year-old
partial male skeleton of the species
Australopithecus afarensis. This is the
first time since the excavation of Lucy
in 1974 that paleoanthropologists have
turned up more than isolated pieces of
an adult from the species, which lived
in East Africa from about 4 million to
3 million years ago. The nearly complete
skeleton of an A. afarensis child was
retrieved from another Ethiopian site in
2000 and described in 2006 after years of
fossil preparation (SN: 9/23/06, p. 195).
The new fossil’s discoverers con-
sider this a Desi Arnaz moment: As the
actor often exclaimed to his wife and
costar Lucille Ball, “Lucy, you got some
’splainin’ to do!”
But other researchers are not so con-
vinced that the new fossil changes much
of what they already knew about Lucy
and her kind.
The fossil’s discoverers, led by anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of
For the first time since 1974, research-
ers have unearthed the partial skeleton
of an adult Australopithecus afarensis.
on comparisons to chimps and indicated
to some scientists that she lacked the
easy, straight-legged stride of modern
people. Haile-Selassie and his colleagues
suspect that their final reconstruction of
Big Man’s anatomy will provide a better
www.sciencenews.org
July 17, 2010 | SCIENCE NEWS | 5
