Did the World’s Earliest Link to Mankind Have a Child..?

She was only three years old, but her bones were preserved for more three million years. An almost complete skeleton of a “prehistoric child” has been dug out the rocks in Ethiopia – long known as the ‘cradle of civilization”. In fact, the skeletal remains of the small “Dawn-child” were discovered in the same area as “Lucy” the world’s oldest prehistoric female – also known as ‘Australopithecus Afarensis” – and whose remains were excavated in 1974.

There’s a slight difference in age: Lucy has been carbon-dated at being 3.18 million years old, while Lucy’s “daughter” has been pegged at 3.3 million years – give or take a month or two.

Max Planck – a German – representing the University of Addis Abeba is co-credited with the discovery, which took place in the Dikika area in northern Ethiopia. Says the find of Lucy’s daughter is significant because up until now the oldest skeletal remains of a child have only been between 300 and 30,000 years ago.

The Dikika region is a formidable one. At over 40 degrees centigrade, the area is unbearably hot. The team’s archeological site was two hours from the nearest village. Bumpy terrain. No amenities what-so-ever. And from mosquitoes to carpet vipers, to the sudden overflow of the tributaries of the Awash River…. ones life is constantly put at risk.

According to fellow researcher Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged, one afternoon he and Planct were in one of their daily routines; head down walking in measured steps with their eyes fixed on the ground when they noticed a skull sticking out of the surface. “It was an incredible piece and I would not believe my treasure until I got back to Addis, cleaned some of the sediments and compared it to other specimensâÂ?¦”

Remarked Planck, “An amazing find. Generally the bones of a child are just to fragile to survive the passage of time to become fossilized.”

According to Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzeig, and one of the participants in the Dikika, Ethiopia project, “âÂ?¦Human fossils are precious and fragile, and to study them scientists have embraced or developed new methods in recent years. CT scanning, for example, is used with increasing frequency to assess fine internal details of specimens, such as the inner ear of the skull. Imaging techniques, combined with sophisticated software for manipulating digitized fossils, allow researchers to work with virtual objects rather than the originals. One can now reconstruct fragmentary specimens, piecing them together on the computer and supplying missing parts. If a skull’s right side is damaged, the left can be copied and a mirror image of it substituted instead. Even specimens warped and distorted in the fossilization process can be straightened out.”

Fellow researchers are excited because the discovery of the child – nicknamed “Selam (which means “peace’ in Amaric) – offers a chance to study eveolution on different levels: on one side researchers can study the general characteristics of the species while on the other they can study the “growth curve” of the child.

Selam has a skull that is 330 cubic centimeters in size – roughly that of a young chimpanzee. Researchers feel that for a three-year old, Selam was within 90% of her typical growth for a child of that age.

Adds Planct, “âÂ?¦the skeleton demonstrates that it was perfectly adapted for living in the environment she was in. One that was rich in rivers and forest with a mixture of small animals, mollusks and fish.

The structure of the skeleton’s knees show that Selam could walk erect, but her long fingers show she was also abe dapt at climbing in trees. Lucy had the same attribues.

Plact used a dentists drill to remove sediment from the small skeleton which had an nearly complete skull, rib cage and spine.

A more complete report – including computer reconstruction of what Lucy’s daughter probably looked like – will be forthcoming in the November issue of National Geographic Magazine.