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Early Human Ancestor Lucy 'Died Falling Out of a Tree' (bbc.com)
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.
and think WTF they were so stupid.
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
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Lucy and Jack sitting in the Tree
K-i-s-s-i welp... thud...
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?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
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.
Do you really need trees taller than 6 feet?
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.
Table-ized A.I.
New evidence suggests that the famous fossilized human ancestor dubbed "Drumpfy" 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 drumpfs in similar falls. The 3.2 million-year-old homidrumpf was found on a treed flood plain, making a branch her most likely final perch. It bolsters the view that her species -- Australodrumpfthecus 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 Drumpy'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, Drumpfy'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, Australodrumpfthecus 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.
Even monkeys* fall from trees.
* To any lurking pedants, I'm aware of the distinction between monkeys and great apes.
The Earth has been here 4500 years, give or take a few. This is ludicround left-wing 'science' at its core. If this 'Lucy' did exist, it was no more than 4500 years ago.
Our ancestors should have stayed up there in the trees. The world would have ended up being a much better place.
I think it's evidence of the first divorce. That'll teach her for not fetching the bananas fast enough!
By a strange, orb-headed creature that had elements of the Bumblebee, which struck her multiple times with a prolate spheroid that had a casing made from bovine skin.
Falling out of a tree is probably how I'll go, too. Everything happens to me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
She didn't fall. She was pushed.
the future of porn is here today.
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 the Hominid climbing up a tree.
F, A, L, L, I, N, G
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Is that like saying she "fell" down the stairs in that era?
making the world a better place one sjw at a time !
She must have had a heart attack on the way down.
Was it a tree, or more like a branching bush?
Early Human Ancestor Lucy 'Died Falling Out of a Tree'
She was dah first niggah
LOOLOOOOOOLL our anchestors be so stooooopid!
I'm told it was a lovely service.
What did Lucy know that Hillary needed to hide?
Lucy!
Thank you from all of us in 2016.
No doubt, the reason for our dreams of falling. Where do our dreams of kidnapping come from?
so we're descended from the ones that fell... or pushed, or slipped on a banana peel...
it explains the amount of slapstick humor, wiley coyote cartoons, and comedy devoted to banana peels...
modern technology: 'I fell down and can't get up.
'
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?
vertical deceleration event
I'm going to have to write that one down.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Not necessarily. His ancestors may have been anchovies. Then they would be his anchestors.
Italian judges have opened a criminal investigation on Lucy's death and are currently rounding up suspects. The anthropologists who examined the body will be interrogated in the next weeks and it will have to be established why they performed the examination without the presence of an Italian law officer.
The jokes just write themselves.
Leaving the sea was a mistake in the first place.
Are you referring to the aquatic ape hypothesis of WestenhÃfer, Hardy, and Morgan?
Take that evolution belivers!
That was so fucking dumb that I am embarrassed for you.
She didn't just fall off the tree. Her mind evolved while picking her butt up in the tree and she suddenly saw how futile everything is. Then she jumped to her death.
If Lucy was correctly wearing CSA/UL rated themsleves, she likely would have survived the fall. Also she should have been properly tied in with a fall lanyard and harness. And where were her supervisor and team members, for goodness' sake!?
We're going to have to fill out a C.14/R hazard form, login in to the Incident Management system and escalate. I want a Safety Coordinator to review the whole setup. Health & Safety is gonna have a bird.
Safety first!
she wasn't just participating in an early pre-cursor of MMA fighting?
Did the apple fall near, or far from the tree?
Just another day in Paradise
if she didn't give birth to another homo sapiens, technically she is not really an ancestor, but a cousin.