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ETHIOPIA's rich heritage: Lucy's birthplace is globally significant

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Bianca
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« on: October 04, 2008, 08:38:38 am »










                       Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old fossil, is a key piece in evolution's puzzle






By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

Some 3 million years or so after her descendants arrived in the Pacific Northwest, Lucy represents just how far we have come from those days of wandering the savannas of Africa, scavenging for food, avoiding predators and awaiting the rapid expansion of a brain that today allows us to, among other things, ponder our origins.

Lucy, known by Ethiopians as "Dinkenesh" (wonderful one) and by scientists as an Australopith, is the popular name given to the rare and highly significant 3.2 million-year-old fossil remains of a female ancestor of modern humans to be displayed in Seattle at the Pacific Science Center from Oct. 4 until March 8.

She wasn't human. But she wasn't really an ape, either. She was, for many, a hint of humankind to come.

"Lucy is simply phenomenal," said Patricia Kramer, an anthropologist at the University of Washington. "You can see yourself in her."

You can, perhaps, as long as you are among those who can imagine having evolved along with chimpanzees, gorillas and other primates from a common -- and now extinct -- ancestor many millions of years ago. Not everyone can so easily imagine this, of course, whether because of conflicting religious beliefs or just that vague "sense" we have of human beings as somehow different, special, compared with the rest of creation.

However the metaphysical debate of our place in the cosmos may some day get resolved, there's little debate within the scientific community today as to the significance of Lucy's role in human evolution on Earth.

"She occupies a pivotal place on the human family tree," said Donald Johanson, the American paleoanthropologist who, with his colleagues, discovered the fossil in 1974 near the northern Ethiopian community of Hadar. "We now know that one of the first significant things our ancestors did was to stand up, to walk on two feet instead of four."
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