From today's New York Times: Lucy’s Kind Had Joints Fit for Climbing Trees
Last year the discovery of a foot bone revealed that, more than three million years ago, the hominid species whose most famous member is known as Lucy probably walked upright.
Zeray Alemseged/Dikika Research Project
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Now a new study reveals that the species, Australopithecus afarensis, was also quite apelike, and very capable of climbing trees. The research is based on the analysis of the shoulder bones of Selam, a 3-year-old of the same species.
“The position or orientation of the shoulder joint was very gorillalike,” said Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and one of the study’s authors.
“We compared it to the primate database,” Dr. Alemseged said. “This is the earliest, most complete scapula ever analyzed.”
He and his colleague David J. Green, an anatomist at Midwestern University, report their findings in the current issue of the journal Science.
Dr. Alemseged speculates that Lucy, Selam and their kin climbed trees to hide from predators and search for food, and perhaps even to nest.
Exactly how much time they spent in trees is hard to say. Other research has revealed that many traits of the species’ hip bone, lower limb and foot are humanlike and well suited for upright walking.
Dr. Alemseged was part of the team that discovered Selam in 2000, in Ethiopia. It took about 10 years to analyze the paper-thin scapula, which was embedded in sandstone, Dr. Alemseged said.
Lucy, a partial skeleton of the species, was discovered in 1974.
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If you Christian scum want more missing links that are no longer missing, read this: This is for the Christian assholes who say there are no transitional fossils.
If you uneducated morons still want to deny your evolutionary relationship with chimpanzees then see my 97 posts about the evidence for evolution at http://darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com/search/label/evidence%20for%20evolution.
There's many reasons why Christians are terrified of science. Their breathtaking stupidity is part of the problem. Another reason for their total ignorance of reality is America's incompetent science teachers. The easiest way to solve that problem would be to immediately throw all Christian teachers out of our public schools. Christians are not qualified to teach science because they don't even know what science is. It's not fair to students to get stuck with an idiot teacher who believes in the Magic Jeebus Man. They need to be fired now.
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If you Christian scum want more missing links that are no longer missing, read this: This is for the Christian assholes who say there are no transitional fossils.
If you uneducated morons still want to deny your evolutionary relationship with chimpanzees then see my 97 posts about the evidence for evolution at http://darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com/search/label/evidence%20for%20evolution.
There's many reasons why Christians are terrified of science. Their breathtaking stupidity is part of the problem. Another reason for their total ignorance of reality is America's incompetent science teachers. The easiest way to solve that problem would be to immediately throw all Christian teachers out of our public schools. Christians are not qualified to teach science because they don't even know what science is. It's not fair to students to get stuck with an idiot teacher who believes in the Magic Jeebus Man. They need to be fired now.
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