Early Human Ancestor Lucy 'Died Falling Out of a Tree' (bbc.com) 123
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: New evidence suggests that the famous fossilized human ancestor dubbed "Lucy" by scientists died falling from a great height -- probably out of a tree. CT scans have shown injuries to her bones similar to those suffered by modern humans in similar falls. The 3.2 million-year-old hominin was found on a treed flood plain, making a branch her most likely final perch. It bolsters the view that her species -- Australopithecus afarensis -- spent at least some of its life in the trees. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers from the U.S. and Ethiopia describe a "vertical deceleration event" which they argue caused Lucy's death. In particular they point to a crushed shoulder joint, of the sort seen when we humans reach out our arms to break a fall, as well as fractures of the ankle, leg bones, pelvis, ribs, vertebrae, arm, jaw and skull. Discovered in Ethiopia's Afar region in 1974, Lucy's 40%-complete skeleton is one of the world's best known fossils. She was around 1.1m (3ft 7in) tall and is thought to have been a young adult when she died. Her species, Australopithecus afarensis, shows signs of having walked upright on the ground and had lost her ancestors' ape-like, grasping feet -- but also had an upper body well-suited to climbing. The bones of this well-studied skeleton are in fact laced with fractures, like most fossils. By peering inside the bones in minute detail, the scanner showed that several of the fractures were "greenstick" breaks. The bone had bent and snapped like a twig: something that only happens to healthy, living bones. "The Ethiopian ministry has agreed to release 3D files of Lucy's right shoulder and her left knee. So anyone with an interest in this can print Lucy out and evaluate these fractures, and our hypothesis, for themsleves." You can find the files here.
Re: Our anchestors will find the first humans on m (Score:1)
So you're one of those crazy people who think our ancestors invented time travel?
How's that working out for you? Not very well since it seems your nuttiness has made you forget a very basic word, you know, descendants. It also made you forget how to spell ancestors.
Well, hope you find that time machine. You can use it to tell yourself to actually pay attention in school.
Lucy in the sky with diamonds 2 (Score:3, Funny)
Picture yourself in the middle of a jungle
On a tangerine tree under marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she's gone
Lucy on the ground with broken leg
Lucy on the ground with broken leg
Lucy on the ground with broken leg
Ouch
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Ending needs work to better fit the pattern of the original. Suggestion B:
"Lucy falls from the sky and dies, man"
Next!
Come on science (Score:2)
How will we know for sure until we make a few dozen clones of Lucy and fling them out of tall trees?
3D prints of an arm, indeed.
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Hardly. Most Republicans are too fat to climb anything.
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No, I was attempting a joke. But I guess in an election year with two goofballs like these, everything said in jest, no matter how outlandish, is taken at face value.
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Re: Come on science (Score:1)
While democrats can't climb the tree for fear of injuring it, put it on the protected list, restrict human traffic in the area, and establish a perennial taxpayer funded program to care for it that eventually gets channeled elsewhere.
Tree or bush? (Score:2)
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Lucy was pushed and this "Jack" needs to be 3D printed and brought in for questioning!
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Maybe, maybe not (Score:2)
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Yeah, "a crushed shoulder joint ... as well as fractures of the ankle, leg bones, pelvis, ribs, vertebrae, arm, jaw and skull" is a long list for a fall. Sounds more like she got run over by a truck.
Unless maybe she was 100' up the tree, and hit a lot of branches on the way down.
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Sounds more like she got run over by a truck.
...or a landing Raptor?
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Sounds more like she got run over by a truck.
...or a landing Raptor?
... or she got dropped by a Raptor.
Re:Maybe, maybe not (Score:4, Funny)
Like this?
High budget scientific re-enactment [youtube.com]
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That, or domestic violence is as old as humanity.
Or rather ... yeah, she ran into a tree, repeatedly. She's rather clumsy, you see...
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It's not clear to me as to why 'getting trampled by a large animal' is ruled out. At just over 3-1/2 feet tall, she probably didn't weigh much. From what height would she have fallen from in order to break all of those bones?
I was thinking more along the lines of: how do they know it was the fall that killed her? She could have had a brain aneurysm, died, and then fell out of a tree.
If the "evidence" is to be believed (and I see many experts argue against it), all it shows proof of is the bones were broken. The locations and orientations of the fractures may indicate they were caused by a fall, but there is no way to know whether the breaks happened pre- or post-mortem.
Yaz
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If you had read the article you would know that the pattern of broken bones matches what happens when someone falls from a height of about 12 meters: broken legs on landing, then broken wrists and shoulders as the person tries to protect themself, then broken ribs and skull. Lucy had all of those; the broken wrists are especially interesting.
Yes, and if you read some of the critique, you'd know that Lucy's skeleton is riddled with cracks and broken bones due to the process of fossilization and millions of years of compression. There are questions as to why the team decided to focus only on specific fractures, and seemed to ignore the others.
I'll admit I haven't read the paper itself yet to see if some of these were indeed death with, but I have read some critique from other researchers in this field, and it seems they have concerns as to metho
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Dude, them commie gubmint leopards can leap to 8.
The Change (Score:5, Interesting)
For roughly 6 million years, there appear to be multiple species of up-right-walking apes who also partly lived in trees and had roughly the same brain-size as chimps. It was a stable niche. Lucy was one of them.
Then new type of "ape" arose around a million years ago that relied ever more on tools and larger brains. The leading theory is that the climate started fluctuating heavily in Africa around that time, favoring adaptability over metabolic efficiency, and this is where human-ness branches off of ape-ness.
Re:The Change (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, that is also consistent with many theories of Bonobo/Chimpanzee species split and the attendant bifurcation of their social evolution (ie. why the Bonobos fuck and the Chimps fight). The Bonobos, being south of the Congo river (newly formed circa 2m years ago), had little climatic distress to deal with, while the Chimps to the north did, which is why they developed a much more aggressive social organization.
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The leading theory is that the climate started fluctuating heavily in Africa around that time, favoring adaptability over metabolic efficiency, and this is where human-ness branches off of ape-ness.
Indeed, Africa is said to be the cradle of intelligence.
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Wouldn't believe it if you looked at it today.
Then again, the middle east was probably the cradle of civilization, Greece the cradle of democracy, the US the cradle of civil rights...
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Well most of the time the peak of ones ability does not occur while they remain in the cradle and when it does we generally look upon it as a kind of tragedy.
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It depends where you draw the line for "humanity". The first shaped stone tools are concentrated in Africa.
Later stone-tool-making hominids did spread out, and it is possible an isolated group became "humanized" at a faster pace and then spread back into Africa and elsewhere.
(I mention stone tools because chimps are known to sharpen wooden sticks with their teeth.)
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"The leading theory is that the climate started fluctuating heavily in Africa around that time"
Impossible, there were neither SUVs nor Republicans. Climate couldn't have changed, particularly rapidly, without either of those things to blame.
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"The leading theory is that the climate started fluctuating heavily in Africa around that time"
Impossible, there were neither SUVs nor Republicans. Climate couldn't have changed, particularly rapidly, without either of those things to blame.
If only she'd died from the flu...but then there were no anti-vax democrats around. /sarcasm
Re: trees (Score:1)
Where is the necessary baseball cap to match this evidence?
MAKE AFRICA GREAT AGAIN,
So Stop Homo Erectus leaving Africa with WALLS
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dude, that joke is older than 4500 years.
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Leaving the sea was a mistake in the first place.
Aquatic ape hypothesis (Score:2)
Leaving the sea was a mistake in the first place.
Are you referring to the aquatic ape hypothesis [wikipedia.org] of WestenhÃfer, Hardy, and Morgan?
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But but... I like digital watches!
EOL (Score:2)
Falling out of a tree is probably how I'll go, too. Everything happens to me.
She didn't fall. She was pushed. (Score:2)
She didn't fall. She was pushed.
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It obviously was a professional hit, staged to look like an accident.
And they would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling anthropologists!
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But they did get away with it. The anthropologists have swallowed the "she fell" story completely. And no-one even had to produce their alibis. It's the perfect murder!
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What difference, at this point, does it make?
It was the video, and they wouldn't allow the military to go in and save Lucy.
Just another case of the Clintons giving lip service to the African community, and not delivering.
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Justice for Lucy! Hominid lives matter!
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Lucy the Hominid (Score:4, Funny)
F, A, L, L, I, N, G
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It's simple. 2 or more of us are stuck in a tree with a hungry predator down below. We can wait and die of thirst of I (or a few of us) could help the unpopular girl 'accidentally' fall out of the tree. Once the predator has carted off it's meal, we can make a run for it.
The fall (Score:2)
So did I! (Score:2)
I'm told it was a lovely service.
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Hollywood? 79 movies in this list... http://www.imdb.com/list/ls070... [imdb.com]
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so we're descended from the ones that fell... or pushed, or slipped on a banana peel...
More likely from the ones that didn't.
"I got a bad feeling about this." (Score:2)
So one of our earliest known, not-quite-human, not-quite-ape ancestors died falling out of a tree?
What'd she land on? Irony?
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Grassy.
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The left says "her head". The right says they don't believe in gravity.
$5.00 Term (Score:3)
vertical deceleration event
I'm going to have to write that one down.
Witness the first Farside cartoon (Score:2)
The jokes just write themselves.
Unanswered Question (Score:2)
Did the apple fall near, or far from the tree?
she may not be an ancestor (Score:1)
Re:Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone dies of something.
Go and survey all the apes in the wild. Everything from murder to falling out of trees, to predators, to falling-out-of-trees-while-fleeing-predators.
Most animals DO NOT die of old-age. That's a very human-centric view.
Getting eaten is visible on the fossils. Disease is often visible too, or suspected only because there are no other injuries (which is suspicious in itself). Even Tutankhamen is thought to have had several fractures when he died and he was only a boy.
For a tree-dwelling species, dying from falling out of a tree is right up there. Once you slip once, whether learning toddler, careless adolescent or fleeing adult, you break bones that are a) visible on your skeleton and b) crippling to your ability to survive.
No antibiotics. No way to monitor or stem blood loss (especially internally). No knowledge to heal the bone. No painkillers. Can't keep up with the pack. You're dead. Hell, you could have just picked the rotten branch and by the time your weight was on it, it was too late to do anything.
Watch a cat. The most graceful of animals. Sure-footed. Sleek. Can land on their feet from stories up. Able to leap up and down trees at stupendous speeds with little or no warning, dive over obstacles, sprint faster than you ever could.
In the last year, from three cats in my house, two have fallen off a windowsill more times than I care to mention, one got trapped in a catflap (by backing out of it while half-way, requiring human intervention because it just kept pulling on it while its tail was caught in the flap the wrong way to escape the flap), one got stuck in a tree, one has a supreme deathwish where sitting in front of moving cars is concerned and only saved by driver prudence (i.e. me), one has come back with bloodied paws on more than one occasion (believed to be from a bad jump down from said tree again, onto sharp ground!), and that's not counting modern hazards, predators, actions made under panic, running between human legs on stairs, etc. for a domestic cat roaming a small garden territory.
I've actually just watched one fall off a sofa because it was sitting on the back of it, went to rub against my hand, misjudged it, and fell to the floor. It shook it off, but it completely messed up a simple action. And this was a young cat, not a kitten or something too-old-to-survive.
It's like saying a professional juggler never drops his balls, or that a professional acrobat never misses a leap. Ask them. They ALL do. They just don't always do it every show. But put enough shows on (i.e. climb enough trees) and it will happen eventually.
Few animals EVER reached old age, unless they were impregnable or zero-risk animals (e.g. tortoises, elephants until humans came along - slow, ploddering, no jumping, etc). Almost none of the hunter-cats ever really get to old-age because they all die of simple injury or infection of injury. There's not much to challenge an old established-pride lion, but the simplest of slips on a rock will kill him.
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Everyone dies of something.
Go and survey all the apes in the wild. Everything from murder to falling out of trees, to predators, to falling-out-of-trees-while-fleeing-predators.
Most animals DO NOT die of old-age. That's a very human-centric view.
Only since quite recently, as early as the 1950s the world average life expectancy was 48 (today it's 67). During the early middle ages people tended to die around 40-45 years of age. Palaeolithic hunter gatherers in Europe, both H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalis did not usually live much past 30-35 or so. They usually died with badly worn teeth, abscesses, bones that show healed fractures, starvation marks and severe arthritis while child mortality was simply frightening.
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This boost is mostly related to child mortality rates violently decreasing, and has little to do with the average age people reach if they survive past the child mortality window.
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Review this comment by another user to the same comment you replied to:
https://science.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org]
Notice how he wasn't brow-beating the poster? He provided a very insightful that hopefully raised the overall "enlightenment" here.
You basically puffed up your chest and made this more about you being better than the original poster.
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Potentially exactly his "chance" death caused it to be preserved? If it had been eaten by a predator, we would not get a complete skeleton (more likely we'd maybe find a bone or a tooth somewhere, with scavengers carrying off what's left of the carcass).
There are many examples of preservation by accident, simply because the specimen in question did something extraordinary. Think of this one for example [wikipedia.org]. He traveled, presumably alone, across the alps. Something you didn't do back then, there was nothing to p
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He traveled, presumably alone, across the alps. Something you didn't do back then, there was nothing to prove or no reason to go for some kind of misguided "self-realization"
Otzi wasn't on a glacier. He lived during a warm period when there was little if any snow at the altitude he was found, although it was cold and dry enough to mummify his body.
His last days were far more interesting and violent than you think. He had cuts on his hands consistent with defending himself against a knife attack. He also had someone else's blood on the back of his shirt consistent with carrying a companion who was injured. He was carrying at least three weapons (a knife, an axe, and a bow/arrow)
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How about falling into a pile of mud that instantly covered her?
Fossils are rare. For many reasons. One of them being that back then burial rites were not really the big craze and animals that die rarely get to fall apart where they fall to the ground. Carrion eaters tend to pluck them apart and carry parts away. Sometimes a corpse gets buried quickly by natural events. Falling into a swamp, or an animal suffocating from a volcano eruption and getting buried under ash.
Yes, that's rare. But so are fossils. I
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Outside of shamanistic, ritualistic use you don't see many people in primitive cultures go on "self realization, self discovery" trips. They tend to have real problems that need solving rather than worrying about the meaning of life.
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So this super rare find didn't die from something usual, old age, disease, got eaten, but happened to die doing something it was very good at and probably killed 1/10000 of their kind.
Modern humans still climb trees; I have seen several programmes on the BBC, for example; one about the Baka people in Cameroun, who climb some 30 meters up in the canopy to gather honey from wild bees - another about a tribe in New Guinea, who build their homes in tall trees. The fact that we have found 1 fossil that probably died from a fall out of a tree doesn't mean that these people necessarily lived in trees or did things we don't do now-a-days.
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" The fact that we have found 1 fossil that probably died from a fall out of a tree doesn't mean that these people necessarily lived in trees or did things we don't do now-a-days"
No... but their upper body structure suggests they were built for climbing and spent at least part of their time in trees. Much more so than modern humans who may "climb some 30 meters up in the canopy to gather honey from wild bees" or "build their homes in tall trees".
I think you are spot on in that we cant say Lucy's folks wer
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If we'd only stop protecting those who aren't more careful, we'd have evolved the gene pool to remove more of the idiots.
I'm joking, but only a little bit.