Ancient Human Bones Found 4.4 Million-Year-Old Skeleton May Represent Man’s Oldest Ancestor
Scientists in Ethiopia reported the stunning discovery of a largely complete, 4.4 million-year-old skeleton, a representative of mankind’s oldest known ancestor, including hip, foot and leg bones that may be from a time when the apelike creatures first began walking.
The bones are so badly crushed that it will take many months to separate them from the hardened clay in which they are encased and put them back together. Until then, crucial questions about the body size, proportions and manner of walking will go unanswered.
But already, the scientists said they know they have so many fragments, all from one individual, that “they just open up worlds of possibility for scientific analysis,” said the expedition leader, vertebrate paleontologist Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley.
The first portion of the skeleton, several metacarpal or hand bones, was spotted on a dry hillside in November by Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a Berkeley-trained Ethiopian researcher. A small crowd of other scientists from Ethiopia, the United States, Turkey, Belgium, Spain and other nations were soon at work carefully excavating the site.
So far, White said Friday, fragments of 90 bones have been recovered, including the jaw with teeth that are vital to identifying the species, leg bones, most of the bones in both wrists, vertebrae, ribs, feet, skull and “most significant, pieces of the pelvis.”
Ordinarily, news of such a find would not be announced by scientists until it had been more fully analyzed. However, officials in Addis Ababa, when they learned of the importance of the discovery, held a press conference, and White was reached by telephone at his hotel.
The first evidence of the species’ existence was reported in September by the same team of Ethiopian and international researchers.
The first fossils, mostly teeth and jaw remains, showed only that it was even more primitive than, and different from, the famed Ethiopian fossil “Lucy,” who at less than 4 million years of age had represented the previous oldest-known member of the human family and who walked fully upright.
The ancient species is called Australopithecus ramidus. The first term refers to and extinct line of early humans that led both to the more modern genus Homo, which includes Homo sapiens, and a series of other Australopithecines that lived in Africa with early Homo species until they died out a little over a million years ago.
The word “ramidus” is from the term for root in the language of the Afar people in the region of Ethiopia where the bones were found. It recognizes that this species may lie at the root of human ancestry from the ape line.
Other researchers on the project include Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo and Berhane Asfaw of the Ethiopian Paleoanthropology Laboratory in Addis Ababa - both of them former students at UC Berkeley - and Giday WoldeGabrial of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
xxxx Elephants may have trampled bones The bones were all close together, scientists say, but the skeleton was almost completely disarticulated - the joints separated and the pieces jumbled about. Scientists believe the ancestral human, who may have stood 4 or 5 feet tall, had died near a muddy water hole and that the remains were on the surface for some months while large animals such as elephants trampled them. Eventually, they became buried in mud and preserved. “They are extremely fragile,” paleontologist Tim White said. “The bones are cracked, and some are very distorted. Even the small bones of the hand and foot are broken into separate pieces.”