Here is another bit of science news. Although only a newspaper
story, the substance of it has been reported in the New Scientist of
4 November 1995.
If Lucy is a male, then the human evolutionary bush has just got
even bushier! :-)
Some will no doubt see the failure to detect that Lucy was a male
was more evidence of the need for caution in accepting claims in
Human Evolution, eg. "If they can't even get Lucy's sex right, how
can we be sure they have got other things right", etc, etc.
It could also be argued that Lucy was only assumed to be a female
because that fitted an evolutionary tree better? Another example of
evolutionary theory hindering, not helping, science?
God bless.
Stephen
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Africa's Eve is found to be an Adam
By Graeme O'Neill
---LUCY, the most celebrated of all hominid fossils, is actually a male,scientists announced this week after 25 years of research.
Lucy's pelvic bones are far too small to accommodate a baby. Andtheir orientation would have made it impossible for a baby to turn thecorner from the uterus and line up with the home straight.
Even in modern women, this sharp angle between the uterus and birthcanal can make birth a tricky and painful affair.
"Lucy is simply not built for giving birth," said Swiss anatomists DrMartin Hausler and Dr Peter Schmid in the latest edition of theJournal of Human Evolution.
It seems the African Eve, celebrated worldwide as the archetypal DawnMother, is actually an Adam 3.2 million years old.
It is a quarter century since American scientist Donald Johansen andhis French colleague Maurice Taieb discovered the remarkably preservedfossil skeleton in Ethiopia. It is of a small, short-legged hominid.
The fossil is the oldest species of the proto- human genusAustralopithecus- the finders named it Australopithecus afarensis andnick- named it Lucy after the character in a Beatles' song, Lucy InThe Sky With Diamonds.
Lucy's skeleton was about two-thirds complete - against the odds, thebody was overlooked by scavenging hyenas and lions and was buriedrapidly by volcanic ash in the Great Rift Valley before the elementscould disperse the bones.
Even some of the tiny bones from the hands and fingers were preservedbut the right half of the pelvis was missing.
The left side of the pelvis and part of the sacroiliac, which anchorsthe spinal column, was enough to tell anatomists that Lucy was norecent fugitive from the rainforests of east Africa, which were inretreat as the climate cooled and became drier.
The legs were short in proportion to the trunk and the pelvis was relatively narrow. The femurs-the major bones in the top of the legs- projected almost straight down from their pelvic sockets, rather than angling in under the body's centre of gravity.
But they didn't splay outwards, in the manner of a chimpanzee orgorilla.
The evidence was clear-Lucy-had walked upright. "Waddled" may becloser to the mark - the pelvic anatomy was not designed for thecurving hips and fluid stride of latter- day great-granddaughters on aParis catwalk.
A widely published artist's impression of Lucy depicts the creature asdark-skinned and hairy with a protruding, ape-like face, large breasts(an evolutionary innovation in humans) and with a baby balanced on theright hip.
But even for a prototype, whose architecture had yet to be refined andbroadened to create a birth canal large enough to accommodate one ofthe boof-headed, large-brained babies of homo sapiens descendants,Lucy's pelvis seemed to be strangely shaped.
For a quarter of a century anatomists have debated various mirror-image reconstructions of Lucy's incomplete pelvis and come todifferent conclusions.
The pelvis is one of the most critical structures in human evolution. Not only is it crucial to an upright stance, as the fulcrum for the spine and legs; its lower bones and pubis, dictate the maximum size of the head and brain of any newborn baby.
An enormous brain and head, in relation to body size, is the definingcharacteristic of modern human beings.
Earlier research which showed measurements of Lucy's pelvic dimensionswere unreliable because after millions of years the pelvis had becomeskewed. In their new reconstruction, Dr Hausler and Dr Schmidcorrected for this distortion, then compared Lucy's pelvicarchitecture with that of one of the more recent descendants, aspecimen of Australopithecus africanus from Sterkfontein Cave in SouthAfrica, designated by the serial number S14.
Lucy, designated by the serial number AL-288-I, is separated from S14by almost the length of a continent and by several hundred thousandyears of evolution.
The interval was long enough for S14's species to develop the largestbrain of any australopithecine around 580cc, compared with Lucy's350cc brain.
Dr Hausler and Dr Schmid say that in non-human primates, includingchimpanzees and gorillas, the brain of newborns is about 42 per centthe capacity of the adult brain.
But in newborn humans, it is only 29 per cent of the average adultcapacity of about one litre-roughly 290cc. Much of the growth in amodern human baby's brain is delayed until after birth. This is whythe bones in a human baby's skull remain open for several years afterbirth.
This innovation, unique to humans, allows the adult human brain tobecome very large without exposing homo sapiens babies to the fatalprospect of being jammed inside the pelvis at birth. It still happensbefore caesarean births, natural selection ensured neither mother norbaby survived to pass on the trait.
The Swiss researchers now propose that Lucy be renamed Lucifer, afterthe Roman god who brought light to the world after a long, dark night.
(O'Neill G., "Africa's Eve is found to be an Adam", Sunday Times:Western Australia, 12 November 1995, p62) -----------------------------------------------------------------| Stephen Jones | ,--_|\ | sjones@iinet.net.au || 3 Hawker Ave | / Oz \ | sjones@odyssey.apana.org.au || Warwick 6024 |->*_,--\_/ | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sjones/ || Perth, Australia | v | phone +61 9 448 7439 | ----------------------------------------------------------------