Word: australopithecus
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That's exactly the case with the new species, which now bears the scientific name Australopithecus ramidus (ramid means root in the local Afar language). Like Lucy and her clan, known as Australopithecus afarensis, ramidus had teeth with some apelike and some human characteristics. But at least one specimen -- a baby molar still attached to a piece of an immature ramidus jaw -- resembles a chimpanzee tooth more than a molar from any known hominid. "It's obvious that it belongs to an ancestor of afarensis," says Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the Nature...
...hundreds of thousands of years earlier than anyone had imagined. Since that find, paleontologists have unearthed many similar bones, some even older than Lucy's, in the same part of Ethiopia where she was found. Most believe that all the fossils come from a single species (scientific name: Australopithecus afarensis) and that this species was probably the forerunner of all later hominids, including modern Homo sapiens...
Since scientific names don't come from pop songs, Lucy was given the tongue- challenging classification Australopithecus afarensis. Many more remains of the species have turned up, including beautifully preserved footprints found in the mid-1970s in Tanzania by a team led by the famed archaeologist Mary Leakey. Set in solidified volcanic ash, the footprints confirmed that Lucy and her kin walked like humans. Some of the A. afarensis specimens date back about 3.9 million years B.P. (before the present), making them the oldest known hominid fossils...
...thrived and passed their genes on to the next evolutionary generation. Between 3 million and 2 million years B.P., a healthy handful of descendants sprang from the A. afarensis line, upright primates that were similar to Lucy in overall body design but different in the details of bone structure. Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, Paranthropus boisei -- all flourished in Africa. But in the evolutionary elimination tournament, the two Paranthropus species eventually lost out. Only A. africanus, most scientists believe, survived to give rise to the next character in the human drama...
...proportions of the skeleton were also a surprise to the scientists. The upper arm bone is about 95% as long as the thigh bone, indicating that the arms dangled to the knees, much as they do in apes. Thus Homo habilis closely resembled Australopithecus afarensis, of which the best-known example is the famed "Lucy" skeleton, which was discovered by Johanson in 1974. Lucy's ratio is 85%; in modern humans, the figure is about...