The skeleton of the famous Lucy - the great-great-grandmother of all people, a kind of still wild Eve - was discovered in November 1974 during excavations in Ethiopia, led by paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray (Donald Johanson and Tom Gray).
Subsequent study of the remains led to the conclusion: they belong to a female 25-30 years old, a little over a meter tall, who lived 3.2 million years ago. The female was our ancestor and was a species called Australopithecus afarensis. She was named Lucy - as the heroine of The Beatles' song Lucy, which sounded from the cassette recorder of scientists at the time when they "washed" the find.
And now Gary Sawyer, Mike Smith of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Scott Williams of New York University who joined them, who recently started another reconstruction of Lucy's skeleton, noticed something strange in it. Namely, foreign bone.
Scientists were confused by one of the dorsal vertebrae, which ended up being from a baboon. That is, from a monkey of similar size. Where did the vertebra from the monkey come from? How could he get in among other bones? Riddle. There were no baboons where they found Lucy.
So maybe Lucy, who is sometimes even assigned the role of the so-called "missing link", is fake? Hoax?
Disassembled skeleton of Lucy: one of the vertebrae - from a baboon. Is it one?
Scott Williams assures that his discovery, which he intends to report at the upcoming conference of the Paleoanthropology Society, does not "cast a shadow" on the entire available skeleton of Lucy. He seems to be real. And the remaining 88 seeds really belong to Australopithecus afar. That is, the ancestor of man, not ape. But, as they say, the sediment remains …
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