Paleontologists have found new evidence that the famous Lucy, now considered the "foremother" of our kind, spent a lot of time on the branches of trees, and not only traveled across the plains, according to an article published in the journal PLOS ONE.
“It may seem unique to us that early hominins like Lucy had the ability to walk upright and spent a lot of time climbing trees. Of course, Lucy herself did not know about her uniqueness and just lived on the ancient Earth, walking on the ground, climbing trees, where she looked for food and weaved nests, until her life was cut short after an accident and falling to the ground. - says John Kappelman from the University of Texas at Austin (USA).
Today among paleontologists and anthropologists there is no consensus about where the homeland of modern man is and when the first representatives of our family appeared. This role is equally claimed by two corners of Africa - the Awash National Park in Ethiopia and the "cradle of humanity" in the Olduvai Gorge in South Africa.
In favor of the first candidate, the remains of "Lucy", a young female Afar Australopithecus who lived 3.18 million years ago in the Afar region of Ethiopia, were found on the territory of this region. Her limbs were adapted for bipedal locomotion, and many features of anatomy were similar to how humans are arranged, which leads many scientists to believe that "Lucy" is a kind of "foremother" of the genus Homo.
Today, Lucy has strong competitors - Littlefoot and the human star Homo naledi from South Africa, so scientists are studying their remains with renewed interest in an attempt to find the true ancestor of the genus Homo.
In August of this year, Kappelman and his colleagues found evidence that Lucy died, falling from a tree and hitting the ground, which raised doubts about her "birthright" among some scientists. Other paleontologists took Kapelman's idea with hostility, expressing doubts about the reliability of the data they used and the methods of their analysis.
Responding to criticism, the authors of the article reanalyzed more than 35 thousand "slices" of her bones, obtained by "scanning" all known remains of her with a CT scanner, and compared them with the remains of two other species of primates - humans and chimpanzees.
As scientists explain, the lifestyle of an animal is reflected in how its skeleton is arranged - in those places that are under maximum stress, the bones thicken, and those bones that are least loaded, on the contrary, become thinner. Accordingly, a comparison of the bones of closely related species allows us to understand where one of their owners lived and what he did, knowing the ecological niches of his relatives.
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“Tennis players are a great example of this phenomenon - the bone tissue in their racket hand is much denser than its counterpart in the other hand,” the scientist continues.
Likewise, human bones gradually "thicken" when viewed from the side of the skull towards the legs, indicating that we are predominantly terrestrial. For chimpanzees, the opposite picture is characteristic - the bones of their arms and shoulders are noticeably thicker and larger on top, which is associated with their arboreal lifestyle.
Lucy, as it turned out, was characterized by a completely different picture - the thickness and strength of the upper and lower parts of her bones were approximately the same, which means that she occupied an intermediate position between humans and chimpanzees.
According to the authors of the article, such a result suggests that Afar Australopithecines spent approximately equal amount of time on the ground and on the branches of trees. According to scientists, Lucy and her relatives built nests in trees, protecting them from predators during sleep or periods of rest. Afar Australopithecines probably descended to the ground during the day and looked for food in the savannas and plains, while not avoiding the forests.
All this, according to Kapelman and his colleagues, does not refute, but speaks in favor of the fact that Lucy and her relatives were indeed a "transitional" species between our ancestors from the genus Homo and ancient hominids.
