Can this primitive creature really be considered the ancestor of man, as many modern scientists suggest?
On the morning of November 30, 1974, in the Ethiopian Afar Desert, Donald Johansson found a fossilized fragment of a human, possibly a skull and other bones, which made up about 40% of the ancient female skeleton. He believed that these bones were the earliest remains of a human or humanoid creature ever found.
On the evening of the same day, Johanson and his colleagues drank beer and listened to the Beatles' song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds". He later wrote: "At some point on that unforgettable evening … we somehow by ourselves began to call our discovery Lucy."
And since then, the creature he found, who died 3.5 million years ago, is known as Lucy.
Lucy was not human, but she was not, as Johanson argued, and a monkey. She was no more than 106 cm tall and walked upright, but her arms reached to her knees, and her shoulders, ribcage, and pelvic bones seemed to be better suited for climbing trees.
Unfortunately, the front of her skull was never found and the exact volume of her brain could not be determined. However, according to the fragments, it was found that it only slightly exceeded the chimpanzee's brain volume and was approximately 230-400 cc.
Lucy was assigned to a group of creatures that had both monkey and human traits. They were first discovered in South Africa in 1925 and were called "southern monkeys" or australopithecines.
It is now believed that there were at least six species of this half-man-half-monkey, of which Lucy at that time was the most ancient representative of science known to science.
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There is no evidence that Lucy's kin have learned how to make tools. Nevertheless, apparently, they still lived about 1 million years ago, when, undoubtedly, they encountered an early man who was already skillfully creating a variety of stone tools.
This raises an uncomfortable question: can this primitive creature really be considered the ancestor of man, as many modern scientists suggest and which is uncritically taken up by most journalists? The most ardent supporter of the idea that Lucy is the ancestor of man is Johanson himself.
The human species is assigned to the genus Nomo. Modern man is called Nomo sapiens (which also includes such "cavemen" as Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon). Our direct ancestor is considered to be a more primitive human species - Homo erectus, whose remains are found in different parts of the world.
But here, among the experts, a fierce debate begins: there are quite a large number of seemingly more ancient and more primitive species of early man-ape, but they exist in some way in the margins of archeology. So few fossils have been found that all theories are based on an extremely poor evidence base.
Johanson's claim that Lucy was the ancestor of real humans is fiercely contested by a member of the most famous dynasty of early man experts, Richard Leakey.
His father Louis and mother Mary were pioneers in the field, and his wife Maeve is also a recognized expert. She continues to excavate and publish work on this topic.
Richard and Maeve Leakey are cautious; they do not share the view that Lucy and her kin are our direct ancestors, as Johanson insists.
Yes, Leakey recognize the family tree of the various species of Australopithecus discovered so far, but they are in no hurry to link the line of development of Nomo with the line of development of any of them.
And although they admit that such a connection probably needs to be made somewhere, they prefer to wait for additional facts to appear. This position enjoys significant support among other scholars.
Richard avoids engaging in direct confrontation on this topic, limiting himself to references to facts that appear to be compelling evidence that the remains of Lucy and other Australopithecines that have been found are much more like apes than people.
He believes that humans descended from some much older creature that lived, perhaps 7.5 million years ago, and whose remains have not yet been found.
According to him, humanity has a much more ancient history than scientists like Johanson believe. Louis Leakey originally believed that the roots of humanity can go back 40 million years; however, in modern science this hypothesis is not recognized.
Clearly, the fossil evidence as it stands will not clarify the questions of our evolution. To achieve this, we would need to find many more fossils, including specimens that have survived in substantially complete form.
But more than 70 years have passed since the Leakey first began their excavations in the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, and during this time extensive and detailed surveys have been carried out in the most likely geological layers.
If such evidence existed, then, presumably, some traces of them would have been found?
Maybe the researchers are looking in the wrong place? Or misidentifying fossils already found? Or both together?
To consider these possibilities, it is necessary to approach these issues from a different angle, and first of all, to find out what kind of environment could give rise to the anatomical features of modern man and where in Africa - or somewhere else - such an environment could be found.
About 25-30 million years ago, most of the land was covered by huge forests. In these forests, different species of primates evolved from a small creature the size of a squirrel moving on all fours.
20 million years ago, we find evidence of the widespread distribution of numerous species of tree monkeys. But about 15 million years ago, the forests began to gradually disappear.
10 million years ago, monkeys still dominated the remaining forests, but then for some mysterious reason, almost all fossil evidence associated with monkeys ceases. Why is an insoluble mystery.
The time period from about 8 million years ago to the Lucy era (about 4.5 million years ago) is the "dark ages" for fossil primates.
Until recently, excavations that have yielded tens of thousands of fossils of other animals from that period have yielded only one humerus, a tooth, and a fragment of a jaw with one tooth.
In 1995, Maeve Leakey identified a new species of very ancient Australopithecus from a series of finds, including an almost complete jaw, part of a tibia, and pieces of skull and teeth found in the eastern part of Lake Turkana. The finds were just over 3.9 million years old.
An even older find in the form of fossilized teeth, a part of the lower jaw, fragments of a skull and an arm, made in Ethiopia by Dr. Tim White, was attributed in 1995 to a different, supposedly preceding genus and species. About 4.4 million years old.
Despite the enthusiasm for these findings, this is not enough for a period of almost 4 million years. In addition, there is no noteworthy explanation that would clarify this lack of data.
According to the orthodox "savannah" hypothesis, it was during this period of the "dark ages" that, following climate change, forest areas decreased so much that the growing primate population faced a shortage of food supplies.
Over time, this base dwindled so much that one of the primate groups decided to look for food outside the forests. She moved to the vast grassy plains of Africa - to the savannah.
And just in these open spaces those characteristics that are now known as characteristic of man had an advantage: upright posture, an increase in the brain, the disappearance of hair. So, by natural selection, those creatures that demonstrated them crowded out those who did not possess them.
Of course, this theory leaves much unexplained. None of the most conspicuous physical characteristics of a person would have an obvious advantage in this new habitat - in the vast plains, teeming with formidable and fast predators.
Of all the primates that lived in the growing cramped forests, only one - our ancestor - got up from all fours and moved on two legs into the savannah. Why?
With the same food shortage, no other monkey species has done the same. Why?
Savannah, with its predators, was a truly hostile environment. And we are, however, asked to believe that a species entered it, abandoning its habit of running - and quite fast - on all fours for a straight posture that would rob it of speed.
It would be natural to expect that all these reckless apes would be quickly exterminated.
From the point of view of an animal, running on two legs is utter folly; most of the energy expended in this is spent on keeping the body upright, and not on pushing it forward and developing speed. This is a highly inefficient method of locomotion - a real problem when chased by a hungry predator.
Why did a certain group of our ancestors change? To this, you can answer that there is no way.
Why does man exist? How are we different from other great apes? Obviously, because we have a larger brain, developed speech, are not covered with hair and walk straight on two legs. However, this is just what immediately comes to mind. In fact, there are hundreds of distinctive features.
Almost incredibly, science has no clear explanation for the evolution of any of these critical characteristics. Of course, some explanations appeared, but not for long: flaws were found in all explanations.
Too many human signs seem to be inexplicable, and therefore scientists, unable to clarify the question, shied away from answering.
Biologists, in particular, drew attention to those aspects of our body that, by all indications, undermined the evolutionary process. Such as brain growth, loss of body hair not seen elsewhere, unique breathing patterns that also make speech possible, and distinctive patterns of sexual behavior.
The brain seems to have grown steadily in size: first, Lucy's brain is the size of a chimpanzee's; Australopithecus brain - about 440 cc; about 650 - in a creature that is considered to be actually early man; from 950 to 1200 - for homo erectus; 1350 - on average for a modern person.
This increase in head volume meant that significant anatomical changes were required in the transition from ape-like to a human-like creature - if only so that a female could give birth to a cub with such a large head.
For this reason, in humans, the female pelvis has a very different shape from the pelvis of the female apes.
And the significance of this increase in brain volume is so great that in a modern person in the first year of life after birth, the brain continues to grow in such large proportions that its size actually doubles. A woman would not be able to give birth if the child's brain was fully formed from the very beginning.
Loss of hairline is also a kind of exceptional feature of modern man. This hairline apparently protected the body from the rays of the sun and from the cold at night.
How, then, living in the savannah - where it is hot during the day and very cold at night - would lead to the formation of this trait, which was reinforced by natural selection?
There was no answer and no …