August 30, 2016 at 11:39 am

Human ancestor Australopithecus Lucy may have died falling from a tree

Popular Science

The remains of an Australopithecus known as Lucy were found in Ethiopia in 1974. The remains of a supposed human ancestor were discovered by the expedition of Donald Johanson. The representative of the species had a small skull, like that of monkeys, but he already knew how to walk upright. The remains found belonged to a female individual, whom archaeologists named Lucy, using the name from The Beatles song “Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds.” Scientists at the excavation site constantly listened to this song, and the choice of name was obvious.

Scientists who studied the remains at different times saw that a number of bones showed signs of fractures. It was believed that the bones were broken after the death of the individual. But John Kappelman from the University of Texas argues that the cause of death of Australopithecus was a fall from a great height.

Most likely, the fall height was at least 10 meters. And it was the fall that caused all the discovered fractures. This is evidenced, in particular, by marks on the tailbone, left humerus and knee. Scientists studied the skull, bones of the arm, pelvis and lower extremities. A tomographic examination of the remains was carried out. When comparing the results with data from studying the remains of modern people who died in a fall from a height, it turned out that the injuries were very similar. The broken arm, Kappelman says, may indicate that Lucy extended her forelimbs in an attempt to soften the impact on the ground.

Scientists did not use the tomograph to determine the cause of death. Experts wanted to know a little more about the lifestyle of australopithecines, and the structural features of Lucy's skeleton could provide such information. "We wanted to know how she lived, not how she died," says Richard Ketcham, one of the study's researchers. “But even Lucy’s death helped to find out some details of her life, in particular, to learn that she spent time in the trees.”

Kappelman first began studying Lucy in 2008. At the same time, a tomographic study was carried out, which was discussed above. After working with the tomograph, scientists received about 35,000 “images” of various areas of the Australopithecus remains. “Lucy is wonderful. There's only one Lucy in the whole world, and you want to explore as many details as possible,” says Ketchum. Tomography is good because it is an opportunity to study the skeleton without destroying it. We can find out not only the structure of the bones from the outside, but also get acquainted with the internal details. Scientists almost immediately noticed that the fracture of the forearm was not similar to the fractures of the bones of other remains. The bone broke into several sharp fragments. There are no signs of healing.

“This alone allowed us to say that Australopithecus broke his arm when he fell from a height,” says Kappelman. There are other signs of a fall from a height, including a broken humerus, a broken knee and pelvis, and signs of trauma to the chest. All these signs together indicate a fall from a height. So says Kappelman and his colleagues. Even the speed of fall was calculated - about 55 kilometers per hour.

After this, scientists began to think about where Lucy could have fallen from. Experts came to the conclusion that it came from a tree. As mentioned above, Lucy was small. According to Kappelman, Australopithecines knew how and loved to climb trees, despite the fact that they could walk upright. It is likely, the scientist says, that Australopithecus could hide in trees from predators. Perhaps Lucy and her relatives climbed trees to sleep. A number of his colleagues disagree with Kappelman’s point of view.

Lucy belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis. By the way, this is the first representative of its species known to science. The height of the individual found was 105 cm, and its weight was about 27 kilograms. The preservation of the skeleton is about 40% - this is an extraordinary success for anthropologists. Lucy's brain was small, its volume was about 400 cm 3. Scientists concluded that Lucy and her relatives could walk upright from the structure of the pelvis with the bones of the lower extremities. Judging by her teeth, Lucy died at the age of 25-30.

“When we learned about Lucy's injuries, I began to empathize with her across time and distance. "Lucy is no longer a bag of bones, but a real person: a small, broken body lying helplessly under a tree," says Kappelman.

Almost half a century after the discovery of Australopithecus bones in Africa, 3D scans of fragments of Lucy’s remains are publicly available on the Internet. If desired, these models can be downloaded and printed on a 3D printer, starting an independent study of the bones.

On the morning of November 30, 1974, in the Ethiopian Afar Desert, Donald Johanson found a fossilized fragment of a human, possibly a skull and other bones that made up about 40% of the ancient female skeleton. He believed that these bones were the earliest human or anthropoid remains ever found.

That evening, Johanson and his colleagues were drinking beer and listening to the Beatles' song "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." He later wrote: “At some point on that unforgettable evening... we somehow spontaneously began to call our find Lucy.”

And since then, the creature he found, who died 3.5 million years ago, has been known as Lucy.

Lucy was not a person, but she was not, as Johanson argued, a monkey. Her height did not exceed 106 cm, she walked upright, but her arms reached to her knees, and her shoulders, chest and pelvic bones seemed to be better suited for climbing trees.

Unfortunately, the front of her skull was not found and the exact volume of her brain could not be determined. However, from the fragments it was established that it was only slightly larger than the brain volume of a chimpanzee and was approximately 230-400 cc.

Lucy was classified as one of a group of creatures that shared characteristics of both apes and humans. They were first discovered in South Africa in 1925 and were called "southern apes" or australopithecines.

It is now believed that there were at least six species of this half-man, half-ape, of which Lucy at that time was the most ancient representative known to science.

There is no evidence that Lucy's relatives learned to make tools. However, they were apparently still alive about 1 million years ago, when they undoubtedly encountered early man who was already skillfully creating a variety of stone tools.

This raises an uncomfortable question: can this primitive creature really be considered the ancestor of man, as many modern scientists propose and which is uncritically accepted by most journalists? The most ardent supporter of the idea that Lucy is a human ancestor is Johanson himself.

The human species is classified in the genus Homo. Modern man is called Homo sapiens (a concept that includes such “cave men” as Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons). Our immediate ancestor is considered to be a more primitive species of man - Homo erectus, whose remains are found in different parts of the world.

But here a furious debate begins among experts: there are quite a large number of seemingly older and more primitive species of early man-apes, but they exist in some way on the fringes of archeology. So few fossil remains have been found that all theories are based on an extremely poor evidence base.

Johanson's claim that Lucy was an ancestor of real humans is fiercely disputed by Richard Leakey, a member of the most famous line of early human experts.

His father Louis and mother Mary were pioneers in this field, and his wife Maeve is also a recognized expert. She continues to conduct excavations and publish works on this topic.

Richard and Maeve Leakey are cautious; they do not share the view that Lucy and her relatives are our direct ancestors, as Johanson insists.

Yes, the Leakes recognize the family tree of the various Australopithecus species discovered so far, but are in no hurry to connect the Homo lineage with the lineage of any of them.

And although they admit that such a connection probably needs to be made somewhere, they prefer to wait for additional facts to emerge. This position enjoys considerable support among other scientists.

Richard avoids direct confrontation on this topic, limiting himself to references to those facts that seem to provide convincing evidence that the discovered remains of Lucy and other australopithecines are much more similar to apes than to humans.

He believes that humans descended from some much older creature that lived perhaps 7.5 million years ago, and whose remains have not yet been discovered.

According to his conclusion, humanity has a much more ancient history than scientists like Johanson believe. Louis Leakey originally believed that the roots of humanity could go back 40 million years; However, in modern science this hypothesis is not recognized.

It is clear that fossil evidence in its current form will not clarify questions about our evolution. To achieve this, we would need to find many more fossils, including specimens preserved in substantially complete form.

But more than 70 years have passed since the Leakes first began their excavations in the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, and during this time extensive and detailed surveys have been carried out in the most likely geological strata.

If such evidence existed, then, one must assume, some traces of it would have been discovered?

Maybe researchers are looking in the wrong place? Or do they misidentify fossils that have already been found? Or both?

To consider these possibilities, it is necessary to approach these questions from a different angle, first by exploring what kind of environment might have given rise to the anatomical features of modern humans, and where in Africa - or elsewhere - such an environment might be found.

About 25-30 million years ago, huge forests covered most of the land. In these forests, different species of primates evolved from a small creature the size of a squirrel that walked on all fours.

20 million years ago we find evidence of a widespread distribution of numerous species of arboreal monkeys. But about 15 million years ago, forests began to gradually disappear.

10 million years ago, monkeys still dominated the remaining forests, but then, for some mysterious reason, almost all fossil evidence associated with monkeys ceased. Why is an unsolvable mystery.

The period of time from about 8 million years ago until the era of Lucy (about 4.5 million years ago) is the "dark ages" for fossil primates.

Until recently, excavations that yielded tens of thousands of fossils of other animals from the period yielded only one humerus, a tooth, and a jaw fragment with one tooth.

In 1995, Maeve Leakey identified a new species of very ancient Australopithecus based on a series of finds, including an almost complete jaw, part of a shin bone, and pieces of a skull and teeth, found in the eastern part of Lake Turkana. The finds were just over 3.9 million years old.

An even older find of fossilized teeth, part of a mandible, and fragments of a skull and hand made in Ethiopia by Dr. Tim White was assigned in 1995 to another presumed earlier genus and species. Approximately 4.4 million years old.

Despite the enthusiasm for these finds, this is not enough for a period of almost 4 million years. Moreover, there is no noteworthy explanation that could clarify this lack of data.

According to the orthodox "savannah" hypothesis, it was during this period of the "Dark Ages" that forest areas decreased so much in the wake of climate change that the growing population of primates faced a lack of food supply.

Over time, this base shrank so much that one of the groups of primates decided to look for food outside the forests. She moved to the vast grassy plains of Africa - to the savannah.

And it was precisely in these spaces that those characteristics that are now known to be characteristic of humans had an advantage: upright walking, enlargement of the brain, disappearance of hair. Thus, through natural selection, those creatures that demonstrated them supplanted those who did not possess them.

Of course, this theory leaves a lot unexplained. None of the most noticeable physical characteristics of man would have an obvious advantage in this new habitat - on the vast expanse of the plain, teeming with formidable and fast predators.

Of all the primates that lived in the increasingly crowded forests, only one - our ancestor - got up from all fours and moved on two legs into the savannah. Why?

Experiencing the same food shortage, no other monkey species did the same. Why?

The savannah with its predators was a truly hostile environment. And we are, however, asked to believe that a species entered into it, abandoning its habit of running - and very quickly - on all fours for an upright posture that would rob it of speed.

It would be quite natural to expect that all these reckless monkeys would be quickly exterminated.

From an animal's point of view, running on two legs is completely stupid; Most of the energy expended in this process is spent on keeping the body upright, and not on pushing it forward and developing speed. This is a very inefficient way of moving - a real problem when being pursued by a hungry predator.

Why did some group of our ancestors change? The answer to this is no.

Why does man exist? How are we different from other great apes? Obviously, because we have a larger brain, developed speech, are not covered with hair, and walk upright on two legs. However, this is just what immediately comes to mind. In fact, there are hundreds of distinctive features.

Almost unbelievably, science has no clear explanation for the evolution of any of these critical characteristics. Of course, some explanations appeared, but not for long: flaws were found in all explanations.

Too many human characteristics seem inexplicable, and therefore scientists, unable to clarify the question, have avoided answering.

Biologists, in particular, paid attention to those aspects of our body that seemed to undermine the evolutionary process. Such as brain growth, loss of body hair not seen in anyone else, a unique way of breathing that also makes speech possible, and a distinctive pattern of sexual behavior.

It appears that the brain has steadily increased in size: first, Lucy's brain is the size of a chimpanzee's; Australopithecus brain - approximately 440 cc; about 650 - in a creature considered to be early man proper; from 950 to 1200 - in homo erectus; 1350 is the average for a modern person.

This increase in head volume meant that significant anatomical changes were necessary during the transition from ape-like to anthropoid creatures - if only so that the female could give birth to a calf with such a large head.

For this reason, the human female pelvis has a very different shape from the pelvis of a female ape.

And the significance of this increase in brain volume is so great that in a modern person, in the first year of life after birth, the brain continues to grow in such large proportions that its size actually doubles. A woman would not be able to give birth if the baby's brain was fully formed from the very beginning.

Loss of hair is also a kind of exceptional feature of modern man. This hairline apparently protected the body from the rays of the sun and from the cold at night.

How could living in the savannah - where it is hot during the day and very cold at night - lead to the formation of this trait and its consolidation through natural selection?

There was no answer and no...

Name options:

"Lucy"

Discoverers:

Johanson Donald, Gray T.

3.18-3.2 million years ago

40% of the bones of the skeleton: fragments of the skull, lower jaw, 7 thoracic vertebrae, 2 lumbar vertebrae, sacrum, fragments of ribs, left and right shoulder blades, humerus, lower epiphysis of the humerus, ulnas, radials, capitate bone, pelvis, left femur , knee joint, right tibia, fragment of the right fibula, proximal (from Latin proximus - closest) - part (for example, of the skeleton) located closer to the body or organ. phalanx of the second or fourth toe. Female about 25 years old.

The bodies of the thoracic vertebrae are extremely elongated dorso-ventrally (from the Latin dorsum - back and venter - stomach), in the anatomy of animals and humans - the direction from the dorsal surface to the abdominal surface. . The spinous process of the lumbar vertebra is narrow and long, like that of a chimpanzee. The transverse processes of the thoracic vertebrae are shortened (sapient sign). Thoracic kyphosis was at the level of 6-10 thoracic vertebrae, as in modern humans. The shoulder blade (as far as can be judged from the fragment) is like that of a pongid. The family of great apes, including modern ones: the orangutan ( Pongo pygmaeus), gorilla ( Gorilla gorilla), chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytesPan paniscus). , different from modern man. The shoulder is small, somewhat more pongid than hominid (although the discriminating power of the morphology of the shoulder joint is not very great). Minimum shoulder sizes for Australopithecus afarensis. The ulna is longer than the humerus. Radial small, gracile Not massive, small, thin, fragile. . The structure of the hand combines pongid and hominid features. The phalanges of the hand are curved, longer than those of humans. The pelvis differs sharply from the pelvis of great apes and, on the contrary, is hardly distinguishable from the pelvis of modern humans. The pelvis is extremely wide and short, platipeloid. Flat pelvis. One of the four typical pelvic shapes according to the Caldwell-Moloy classification. , relatively wider than those of modern women. The general shape of the sacrum is more similar to that of humans than of apes.

The femoral neck is thick, short, and drooping. From the pongids The family of great apes, including modern ones: the orangutan ( Pongo pygmaeus), gorilla ( Gorilla gorilla), chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes), bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee ( Pan paniscus). signs are characterized by the absence of lateral. Located on the side or related to the lateral surface of any organ or organism. protrusion of the greater trochanter and weak development of the linea aspera, however, slightly stronger than in apes. The structure of the walls of the femoral neck is indistinguishable from that of modern humans: the upper and lower walls are thin, thickening distally. The part (for example, of the skeleton) farthest from the center of the body or organ. The opposite of "proximal part". (in African apes, the wall thickness is more uniform in thickness in different places, and the greatest thickness is found in the distal part (for example, of the skeleton), farthest from the center of the body or organ. The opposite of the "proximal part". part of the upper wall). The knee joint is adapted to bipedia. Upright walking, movement on the two lower (hind) limbs. One of the features that distinguishes humans from apes. , the angle of the femur to the tibia is intermediate between chimpanzoids and humans. The foot is intermediate between apes and modern humans. The arch of the foot is pronounced. Height is about 1.07 m, weight is about 28-30 kg. The shoulder-femoral index is intermediate between bonobos and modern pygmies. The legs are relatively shorter than those of modern human women.

Pathologies: Bone growths on the ventral side of the thoracic vertebrae; vertebral osteophytosis is weak.

Main sources:

Johanson D. et Edey M. Lucy: the beginnings of humankind. New York, 1981: Simon and Schuster.
Eide G. et Jungers W.L. Shape and relative size of the sacrum of A.L. 288-1 ( Australopithecus afarensis) // A.J.Ph.A., 1997, Supplement 24, pp.106.
Rak Y. Lucy's pelvic anatomy: its role in bipedal gait // JHE, 1991, V.20, pp.283-290.

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. Subsequent study of the remains led to the conclusion that they belonged to a female, 25-30 years old, just 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 - after the heroine of The Beatles' song Lucy, which sounded from the scientists' cassette recorder while they were "washing" the find.

Assembled skeleton of Lucy

And now Gary Sawyer, Mike Smith from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Scott Williams from New York University joined them. , who recently began another reconstruction of Lucy's skeleton, noticed something strange about it. Namely, foreign bone.

Scientists were confused by one of the dorsal vertebrae, which ultimately turned out to be from a baboon. That is, from a monkey of similar size.

Where did the monkey vertebra come from? How could he get stuck among other bones? Mystery. After all, where Lucy was found, there were no baboons.

So maybe Lucy, who is sometimes even given the role of the so-called “missing link,” is fake? Hoax?

Lucy's skeleton disassembled: one of the vertebrae is from a baboon. Is it alone?

Scott Williams assures that his discovery, which he intends to report on at the upcoming conference of the Paleoanthropological Society, does not “cast a shadow” on the entire existing skeleton of Lucy. He seems to be real. And the remaining 88 bones actually belong to Australopithecus afarensis. That is, the ancestor of humans, not monkeys. But, as they say, sediment remains...

BY THE WAY

Women started wagging their hips 3.2 million years ago

Scientists who still believe that Australopithecus afarensis really existed were extremely excited by a bone from another female who lived next to Lucy at about the same time. In their opinion, this bone will make them look at primitive women differently. To the point that movie directors will stop depicting them in their films as clumsily hobbling, waddling from side to side. Like, for example, in Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Our great-great-grandmothers, although not model-like in appearance and still hairy all over, turned out to walk quite gracefully. And they were already swaying their hips invitingly.

The bone was found in 2011. Before that, most scientists believed that Lucy climbed trees. And if she stood on her hind legs, it was only to look out for prey or enemies. However, opponents of this version argued: Lucy was exclusively upright, her arms were not as long as those of monkeys. In addition, Lucy's skeleton was more human-like than the skeleton of chimpanzees or gorillas. And now the latter’s point of view has been confirmed.

Reconstruction of Lucy's appearance and a bone that testifies to the upright posture of our great-great-grandmother.

Having studied the bone, we found out that it was part of the foot,” says one of the researchers, William Kimbell, about the find. - This is the fourth metatarsal bone, connecting the tibia to the phalanx of the finger. From it we calculated that the feet of Australopithecus afarensis were designed primarily for walking on two legs. And their gait was similar to the gait of a modern person.

Upright walking and running, as scientists suggest, contributed to the intensive development of the hips and gluteal muscles, which gradually increased in mass. So, already more than 3 million years ago, in many ways, still wild women not only laid the foundations of the current - attractive - figures and, accordingly, developed a graceful gait, but also already had quite decent butts.

Photo: David L. Brill

Members of an international scientific team searching for fossils carefully examine rock outcrops while a local Afar man watches over them. The Awash River hides behind the trees on the horizon. In this area, fossil remains have been found more than once that are extremely important for understanding the course of human evolution, including an almost complete skeleton of the oldest probable human ancestor known to us. Photo: David L. Brill
Photo: David L. Brill
Ahamed Elema, a leader of one of the Afar tribes and a member of the expedition, likes to joke with Tim White, one of the project leaders, during a short rest. Photo: David L. Brill
Photo: David L. Brill
The other two project leaders, Berhane Asfo (pictured) and Giday Walde-Gabriel, along with graduate student Leah Morgan, pay close attention not only to what is under their feet, but also to what is around them. Photo: David L. Brill
Dust rises into the air and stands in a column as people begin to comb the area where fragments of the skeleton of Homo sapiens were found. Loose material from the surface of the earth is swept away and then sifted through a sieve (in the background). The perimeter of the excavation area is marked with blue flags, and the locations of finds are marked with yellow flags. Photo: Tim D. White
Photo: John Foster
Herto, Bori Peninsula, Ethiopia. The child’s skull is evidence of an ancient ritual (in the picture: this is how the artist imagines this ritual). The smooth surface of the skull, found near the village of Kherto, suggests that it was often handled. That is, probably 160-154 thousand years ago, the remains of this child were relics that were revered by ancient people. But we will never know what specific meaning they put into this shrine. Photo: John Foster
Photo: John Foster
Hata, Bori Peninsula, Ethiopia. Our possible ancestors, Australopithecus, were more prey for lions and hyenas than competitors in the hunt. However, as early as 2.6 million years ago, these apes were using crude stone tools. They picked up carrion, with their primitive tools they scraped meat from the bones of mammals and extracted bone marrow (in the photograph: this is how the artist imagines it). These scavengers only wanted to feed themselves and live another day - but this expansion of the diet had enormous consequences. High-calorie food stimulated the development of the brain (a very energy-consuming organ) and ultimately led to the emergence of the genus Homa. Photo: John Foster
Photo: John Foster
Aramis, Ethiopia. A male Ardipithecus ramidus (in a tree) hands nuts to a female standing on the ground. Today, scientists are inclined to believe that Ardipithecus, the oldest hominin known to us, could confidently move on four limbs along branches and at the same time, not very dexterously, on two legs on the ground. The brain will only increase in their descendants; Ardi's brain was no larger than that of a chimpanzee. Photo: John Foster

Judging by the latest findings, the cradle of our intelligence is the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. This is where you can find out how we became human. Various representatives of the human race have been living in these places for six million years, and it was here that a sensational discovery was made - a new link in our evolution was discovered. The author of National Geographic, together with a scientific expedition, visited Middle Awash and was convinced: Adam’s brain was larger than ours, meat made us human, and love made our ancestors walk on two legs.

Text: Jamie Shreve

The Afar Desert is fraught with many dangers. Death awaits a person everywhere: wild animals, steep cliffs, skirmishes of local tribes... Despite all this, in the Ethiopian region of Middle Awash, located around Lake Yardi and belonging to the Afar people, paleoanthropologists have been conducting research for many years. And they would not agree to exchange this region full of dangers for the calmest corner of the world, because there is no place on Earth where it would be better than in Middle Awash to trace the evolutionary path of humanity - from a humble monkey to a species in whose hands the future lies planets. It was here, in Middle Awash, that scientists made an amazing discovery. The project participants, led by Tim White, Berhane Asfo and Giday Walde-Gabriel, prepared the materials for the sensational publication for 15 years and made them public only in 2009. So, our hitherto unknown ancestors, a new stage of evolution, have been discovered. Perhaps this is the missing link in the story of the transformation of ape into man? Homo sapiens: how Adam was found. The remains of hominids (some scientists include in this family the genus of people (Homo) and our near and distant fossil ancestors) were found in 14 layers of the Middle Awash, dating back to different geological eras. That is, it was here, on the territory of Ethiopia, that our distant ancestors gradually became more and more intelligent over the course of several million years.

2.5 million years ago, certain “they”, the owners of tools, came to Khata. Not everyone was able to leave here...

The secret of this treasure trove of paleoanthropologists is that the fossils here are very well preserved thanks to the Afar Depression, located directly above the widening fault of the earth's crust. The depression is constantly deepening - and ancient bones come to the surface, securely buried millions of years ago by volcanoes, earthquakes and sediment accumulations. Today, in the Middle Awash, traveling from one era to another takes a couple of days, as I discovered when I joined the expedition of Tim White, a paleoanthropologist from Berkeley. His team went through all the places where the remains of our ancestors were discovered in Middle Awash, delving further into history and getting closer to the origins of the mind, in order to eventually get to a new link - the most ancient human ancestor known to us. Our expedition consists of two dozen scientists and students, as well as six armed guards (in modern Ethiopia you have to be prepared for anything). We go to the Afar village of Kherto. The most diverse group imaginable is chatting animatedly around me: the burly and lean 58-year-old American White, the former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia and a very friendly person Asfo, geologist from New Mexico Walde-Gabriel, geologist Bill Hart from the University of Miami and even the leader of the Afar Bori-Modaitu tribe, Ahamed Elema, a longtime admirer of paleoanthropology. It is not surprising that the young shepherds we met - a boy and a girl with a herd of goats - are keenly interested in who we are. The Afar are a pastoral people and little has changed in their lives over the past 500 years, apart from the introduction of firearms. We approach a village - grass-covered huts and hedges of thorny bushes, with the petrified remains of hippopotamuses sticking out from under the yellowish sand here and there. And nearby we notice a teardrop-shaped stone tool, about 12 centimeters in length. The Afar people do not make tools from stone - we have reached our first window into the past. Here White's group discovered a perfectly preserved hominid skull in 1997. Geologist Walde-Gabriel, having collected pieces of obsidian and pumice (which are more valuable to him than gold because they can usually be dated) in the same layer, found out that the skull is between 160 and 154 thousand years old. And this is the skull of the oldest Homo sapiens found to date, Tim White is sure. These are the remains of the first known homo sapiens, who lived in Africa when the common ancestors of humanity lived here. The fact is that geneticists, having compared the DNA of modern people from different regions of the Earth, came to the conclusion: all of humanity came from one group of people who lived in Africa at exactly this time - 200-100 thousand years ago. Although the theory of African origin is not yet generally accepted, the time-appropriate skull from Herto has already become significant evidence and even a symbol of it. The first person is too smart. What did Adam look like? His elongated face makes him similar to earlier and more primitive species of Homo. But the most remarkable thing about the wide, rounded skull is its size: 1450 cubic centimeters in volume - more than that of our average contemporary! The second, less well-preserved skull, found nearby, was even larger. "We know a few things about these early people, such as the fact that they loved meat, especially hippopotamus meat," White says. Many mammal bones found at Kherto show evidence of impacts from stone tools. So far, however, it is impossible to say for sure whether these people were hunting or while they were picking up the scraps of predators. No traces of fire or other signs of permanent residence were found, so it is unclear where the “people from Kherto” lived. Their stone tools are complex to make, but not very different from tools that were made a hundred thousand years earlier or a hundred thousand years later. There are no figurines and other works of art similar to those discovered in the European Upper Paleolithic, there are no bows or metal objects, and there are no traces of cultivation of the land. But here there is some evidence of the spiritual life of the first man. Asfo found the skull of a child about six years old. The notches found on it (as well as on the skull of an adult, which was worse preserved) indicated that the flesh had been carefully removed from it, and in such a way that one could rather assume some kind of ritual than cannibalism. The surface of the small skull is smoothly polished, a sign that it has been handled frequently. Perhaps the skull was passed on to each other, venerated as relics are venerated. And this happened over the lives of many generations - until someone put it for the last time where it lay to this day. Homo erectus: grandfather of Adam. We have just been at the point “200 thousand years ago”, and now we will jump immediately a million years ago to meet the “grandfather” of Adam from Herto. To do this, after a quick snack, we go to the site known as Dakani-hilo, or simply Daka. The sedimentary rocks of Dhaka are a million years old and the remains found here are just as old.

It was possible to extract an almost complete skeleton of the individual. It was a completely unknown genus of hominids, and a very ancient one at that.

In late 1997, graduate student Henry Gilbert, while exploring Daka, noticed the top of the skull, which erosion had gradually released from the sediment. By evening, the team had cut out the 50-kilogram sandstone ball containing the fossil and carefully wrapped it in medical plaster bandages. At a museum in Addis Ababa, sandstone was carefully removed using toothpicks and porcupine quills to reveal the entire top of a skull belonging to a representative of the species Homo erectus (one of its subspecies is known as Pithecanthropus). Homo erectus, first found in Indonesia, is one of the most likely direct ancestors of Homo sapiens. In terms of body size and proportions of limbs, he was already very similar to us. His typical tool was a double-edged stone hand ax, the like of which Elema shows me: a large piece of black basalt, worked on all sides, the sharp end broken off. This is, of course, a cruder weapon than the ones I just saw in Herto. But with its help, Homo erectus successfully adapted to a variety of conditions and, it seems, was even the first hominid migrant to leave Africa (this happened about two million years ago), after which he managed to reach Southeast Asia. The volume of the skull of a man from Dhaka is a thousand cubic centimeters, which is much less than that of Homo sapiens. The innovation aspect is even worse: Homo erectus's tools remain essentially the same for a million years, which, in the words of one anthropologist, was "a period of almost unimaginable uniformity." “Homo erectus was amazingly successful, covering enormous distances when migrating,” White said. – And most importantly, its ecological niche was determined by the use of tools. If we delve further into the past, to a place where this factor did not exist, a completely different world will appear before us.” Mysterious owners of guns. To get to these distant places and find the ancestors of Homo erectus, we only had to take one step. Not far from Dhaka, a huge chunk of time was erased from the sequence of time layers by the whim of erosion. Having stepped over this gap, we were transported another one and a half million years ago and came out onto a ledge above a bare plain, riddled with cracks and ravines, ash-purple in the midday haze. The rocks lying below us are Khata, a window into an even more distant past. Here I happened to be convinced: the work of a paleoanthropologist is similar to the work of a detective. The same tasks - to find the slightest evidence (in the case of a paleoanthropologist - the presence of our distant ancestors) and, using indirect traces, to restore the full picture of events. The difference is that the “evidence” of paleoanthropologists is sometimes so insignificant that forensic experts would simply not notice it. Thus, in 1996, White's group carefully examined the fossilized bones of antelopes, horses and other mammals in Hut. And not in vain - as a result, scientists noticed traces of notches on them made by stone tools as much as two and a half million years ago! These were some of the earliest evidence of the use of tools. “The marks on the antelope's jaw indicate that its tongue was cut out,” White says. “This means that they used tools to extract edible parts from animal carcasses.” So, undoubtedly, two and a half million years ago, some “they” visited Khata, the mysterious owners of very ancient tools. But who are these “they”? Did they already belong to the genus Homo (that is, people), like Homo erectus, or were they apes who, however, already made tools? It turned out to be difficult to give an answer, especially since the guns themselves were not found nearby - the one who cut up the carcasses then left and took them away. "They didn't live here," White says. “They came, did their job and left.” Nevertheless, scientists carefully explored this site in search of “them” - and were eventually rewarded. Not all “they” were able to leave Khata: a few meters from the remains of the animals, researchers discovered a femur, several arm bones and a fragment of the lower jaw that belonged to one hominid. The femur was quite long, a feature of Homo, but the forearm was also long, a feature of apes, which rely on all four limbs to move. The following season, skull fragments were found. Some features, especially the size of the front teeth, made it similar to Homo. However, the molars and premolars were simply huge! And the volume of the cranium was only 450 cubic centimeters (versus a thousand in Homo erectus). The team named the owner of the ancient tools Australopithecus garhi (“garhi” means “surprise” in the Afar language), deciding that it was a new species of Australopithecus, one of the oldest hominid genera known to us. It is still not known for sure whether Australopithecines are our direct ancestors or “uncles”, but, however, Garhi lived at the right time and in the right place to be the direct ancestor of Homo. Australopithecus: Lucy's brothers. Garhi, who lived two and a half million years ago and knew how to make tools, is a rather late species of Australopithecus. And to get to know its earlier ancestors, we had to make our way through the territory of the warlike Alisera tribe, whom scientists optimistically described as “cowboys always ready to grab the trunk.” To avoid trouble, we paid a courtesy visit (accompanied by six police officers, by the way) to the dusty village of Ajantole on the edge of the Awash River floodplain. We were lucky that Elema was with us: the leader of Bori-Modaitu, being the head of the region, still enjoys the respect of all the Afar tribes of Middle Awash. Afar people traditionally greet each other with a daghu ceremony: quickly kissing hands and exchanging news. In other villages we visited, locals gathered in droves to organize a daga. Here only a few people came out to greet us, and the chief did not even look out of the hut, so Elema went inside to talk to him.

And then hominids become more and more interested in meat, and the result is you and me!

White, meanwhile, tried to arrange a dag with one thin young man, but he quickly left. “A couple of years ago this guy got mad because I wouldn’t hire him,” White said. “He then grabbed the knife and others had to calm him down.” Despite all our efforts, we still had to skip the next stop on the time walk: it should have been made on the other side of the river, and as a result of the war between the Afar and Issa peoples, the lands along the river became a dangerous no man's land, which is good for nature, but bad for fossil hunters. It’s a pity - the jaw and skeleton fragments of an older australopithecus than the Garhi were found there - Australopithecus afarensis (age - 3.4 million years). The most famous representative of Au. afarensis is the famous Lucy, found in 1974 in East Africa. Its age is 3.2 million years, and its brain volume was not too different from that of a chimpanzee. However, the structure of her pelvis and limbs indicate that Lucy was already moving on two legs. Some scientists, however, argue that Lucy's long curved fingers, long arms and some other features indicate that she also climbed trees no worse than a chimpanzee. But we could get to the location where Lucy's elder relative was found, so we headed southwest through the erosion-riddled wasteland known as the Central Awash Complex (CCA). Periodic eruptions left thin layers of volcanic tuff between the sedimentary deposits - like layers of cream between the layers of a giant cake. Over time, the magma lifted the “cake” and tilted it, exposing the sediments and tuff between them (and this can often be dated). Our route passed along inclined layers, so that in space we moved horizontally, and in time vertically, penetrating deeper and deeper into the past. The fact that in the past the magnetic poles of the Earth changed places more than once helps to navigate in time. One of these changes, known to have occurred 4.18 million years ago, left its mark—magnetized mineral particles aligned with the ancient pole—in some CCA rocks. And right under this stamp of time is the site where the jawbone of the hominid Australopithecus anamensis was found in 1994. This species of Australopithecus (remains of representatives of the species were also found in two areas of Kenya) is slightly older and more primitive than Lucy, however, judging by the tibia and femur, it also walked on two legs. Actually, the main difference between the two types is the time of their existence. Ardipithecus: the missing link? Finally we reached the main goal of our journey. The sun-scorched flat area where the sensational discovery was made is outwardly unremarkable. Except perhaps for an uneven semicircle made of pieces of basalt. The pile of rocks marks the spot where Tokyo-based paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa noticed a hominid tooth protruding from the ground on December 17, 1992. A few days later, fossil hunter Alemayehu Asfo found a fragment of a child's jaw nearby with a molar sticking out. “This tooth was unlike any tooth known to science,” White says. “We had something completely new in front of us!” The group outlined the boundary of the area, named it Aramis (not at all in honor of the most gallant of the musketeers, as one might think, but in honor of the Afar tribe living in these parts) - and began to comb the territory up and down. A year later, an unworn fang, other teeth and a hand bone were discovered. In 1994, scientists also found hand and foot bones, a tibia, and fragments of a skull and pelvis. At first no one dared to even think about it, but it soon became clear that in addition to individual bones, an almost complete skeleton of the individual had been recovered. And as complete as Lucy’s skeleton, but unlike her or anything paleoanthropologists had ever seen before. This was a new, completely unknown genus of hominids, and very, very ancient. The genus was given the name Ardipithecus (ardipithecus - from the Afar "ardi" - "earth", "floor"), and the species was named ramidus (from the Afar "ramid" - "root"). Apparently, most of the remains of Ardipithecus were stolen by hyenas - and only the skeleton of one female miraculously escaped their teeth. It is likely that after the ancient woman, now known as Ardi, died, her remains were trampled into the mud by passing hippos or other herbivores, thus saving the skeleton from scavengers. Having lain underground for 4.4 million years, the remains could have turned to dust after spending at least a year or two on the surface. “It's more than luck,” White says. “This is a real miracle!” Meanwhile, Walde-Gabriel found out that the deposits with the bones of Ardipithecus were sandwiched between layers of volcanic ash - the Gaala tuff and the daam-aatu tuff (that is, “camel” and “baboon” - these are the romantic Afar names given to the ash layers in Middle Awash). The age of both tuffs is approximately the same - 4.4 million years. That is, very little time passed between the two eruptions - perhaps no more than a millennium, so the lifespan of Ardipithecus can be determined quite accurately. It took another two years to extract the skeleton from the rock, and more than a decade to clean, process and catalog six thousand bone fragments from Aramis, conduct isotope analysis of the teeth and create digital versions of the bones. For 15 years, only White and a few of his colleagues had access to the skeleton. The rest of the world waited patiently for the group to publish the results of Ardi's research—research that ultimately blew everyone away. Firstly, before the discovery of Ardi, scientists believed for more than a hundred years: our ancestors began to walk on two limbs when, having left the forests, they went out into the open savannah, where there was no need to climb trees, but it was necessary to move long distances and look above tall grass. However, the characteristics of the teeth of Ardipithecus, as well as analysis of the enamel, indicate that the diet of the species was consistent with life in the forest. If these creatures were indeed bipedal, the time has come to say goodbye to one of the main postulates of the theory of human evolution. However, was Ardie bipedal? There are arguments both for and against. (Read more about this oddity, as well as other Ardi mysteries). Interestingly, scientists were previously sure that Lucy's ancestors (which is probably Ardi) should have looked even more like chimpanzees. However, Ardi decisively refuted this hypothesis - some of her traits are too primitive even for chimpanzees, while others, on the contrary, are too progressive. That is, although humans and modern apes descend from a common ancestor, their evolutionary lines likely developed in completely different directions. And it is not surprising that when I asked whether Ardi’s transitional structure allowed her to be called the very “intermediate link” between ape and man, White replied with irritation: “The term itself is unfortunate in so many ways that you don’t even know where to start. Worst of all, it suggests that at some point there lived on Earth a creature that was half chimpanzee and half human. Ardi must bury this delusion once and for all.” The main value of Ardi's discovery, according to White, is that it allows us to imagine human evolution in three stages. The first stage is Ardi itself, that is, the genus Ardipithecus. This is a primitive, but probably already bipedal, forest dweller. The second stage is the genus Australopithecus. Their brain is still small, but their upright posture is fully developed, their habitat is not limited to forests, and they begin to use tools. And then hominids, picking up scraps from predators, become more and more addicted to high-calorie meat, which promotes brain development, and the result is voila! – the genus Homo: erectus, sapiens and you and me. And if we move deeper again, what did that very last common ancestor look like, uniting us with chimpanzees, who once lived but has not yet been found? Most likely, according to White, he was like Ardi, only without the features that allowed her to walk on two legs. But that's just a guess—and if there's one thing I learned in Middle Awash, it's to not trust guesses. “If you want to know what something looked like,” White says, “you only have to do one thing: go out and find it.”

The famous female Australopithecus Lucy died. How did we know about Little Foot?

Human ancestor Australopithecus Lucy may have died falling from a tree