Life And Death 3,000,000 Years Ago

Roughly 3. 5 million years ago,  Lucy australopithecus afarensis, one of the most important fossils  ever found roamed the African savanna. Today, using the latest scientific research  we're going to reconstruct her life and her death as much as we possibly can. 

From the terrible danger she would have faced, to her greatest moments and perhaps even the  first glimpses of what makes us truly human. This is Life and Death Three Million Years Ago Lucy's life began in the same way as all life  does, with a bang. She was born into a world that was in many ways familiar to ours but in some  ways vastly different.

Millions of years before our species had scarred the planet, this was a  wild world absolutely teeming with life. Some we would recognize as the ancestors of modern  animals others would be quite different. Like Theropithicus brumpti, a relative of the galada  but twice the size, weighing up to 50 kilograms.

Likely it preferred to eat plants but you  wouldn't catch me getting in the way of one. Megantereon, sabretooth cats built like  a leopard on steroids with huge teeth and strong jaws to bring down the largest of prey.  Perhaps most dangerous of all, crocodiles.

Many more species than we have  now, lurking hidden in the water. For a young australopithecus like Lucy, life  was far from guaranteed and the archaeological record is full of examples of our ancient  ancestors falling prey to these beasts. A paranthropus aka robust australopithecus  with two puncture marks in the skull.

Probably caused by a leopard. Drgged across  the savannah by your skull, horrible way to go. The bones of thirsty australopiths, peppered  with the puncture marks of crocodile teeth.

No doubt caught off guard  as they went for a drink. Ripped from the water's edge  by a crocodile lying in wait. Saddest of all perhaps the small Taung child.

A  roughly three-year-old australopithecus africanus that lived around 2. 8 million years ago. Judging  by the marks on the insides of their eye sockets, seemingly plucked from the  savannah by a predatory bird, probably an African crowned eagle,  and carried away to a grisly end.

Lucy, however, survived these challenges. Possibly  by spending a lot of time still in the trees. Although we're confident Lucy was bipedal from  her short and wide hip, a fully extendable knee, and many other anatomical features, her upper body  and the upper bodies of other afarensis hominins are more complicated, seemingly retaining many  more ape-like features.

In 2012 anthropologists found the intact shoulder blade of a young  australopithecus afarensis which they called Selam. This was a critical discovery because even  though Lucy is 40% complete her shoulder blades are missing. Denying us a crucial piece of the  anatomical puzzle.

Selam's shoulder blades were much more similar to modern juvenile gorillas than  modern humans suggesting that some of their time was still being spent in trees. However, it is  also possible that these were archaic features that australopiths retained from our last common  ancestor with chimpanzees and that they served little practical purpose. Changing very slowly  due to a lack of strong evolutionary pressures.

Apart from avoiding becoming lunch, her childhood  was probably similar to modern great apes. Playing with other kids, rolling around  in the grass, jumping on her siblings, watching the adults in her group, learning  the skills she would need to survive. Consistently, probably the greatest challenge  Lucy would have faced is finding food.

Analysis of the teeth of 20  different australopithecus aferensis indicates that their diet involved a lot  of c4 plants. These are grasses, sedges, succulents the kinds of plants that  thrive in a dry open savannah environment. They could have been eating the grasses and seeds  themselves or possibly the roots and tubers which are much higher in calories.

Because of their  inaccessibility, competition for these buried foods is rare and it could have provided a decent  meal for an australopith smart enough to dig for them. These foods are almost entirely avoided by  our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, and this change of diet marks a significant  moment in the direction of our evolution, away from the resources of the forest, towards  the more varied resources of open landscapes. Just because this food source has little  competition though does not mean that their life was easy.

Teeth from australopiths that  lived 1 million years after Lucy showed that they experienced seasonal stress in their diets. Lucy  may well have faced similar hardships and likely spent a long time roaming the savannah in search  of food. Absolutely stunningly, footprints from Lucy's time have been preserved in the earth for  us to study today, called the laetoli footprints.

What's fascinating about these footprints is that  recently more have been discovered from the same location that suggest there were different walking  styles, different gaits used by hominins at this time. How well australopiths could walk and run  has been a big debate in anthropology and these different footprints will certainly be analyzed  for clues to the evolution of our bipedalism. Not only are the Laetoli footprints an  incredible relic of ancient human life, they are the literal footsteps of some of our  most ancient ancestors, but they're also a reminder that three million years ago  humanity was very much in its infancy and there were probably many distinct groups, each subtly  different, each with its own specific quirks, survival strategies and biological adaptations. 

When Lucy was wondering the earth though, trying her best not to starve, she almost  certainly was not just on the lookout for plants. She probably had a taste for something  meatier and had a secret weapon to get it. Many monkeys and apes use tools to acquire food. 

So it's likely that there has never been a point in hominin evolution where we were not using  some form of primitive tools. What separates our lineage, hominins, from our other cousins though  is the ability to really modify tools and improve them. Particularly stone tools.

It was believed  for a long time that the first modified stone tools were the Oldowan stone tools created by  our genus homo, specifically homo habilis, around 1 million years after Lucy had died. However,  recently stone tools were unearthed that date to 3. 3 million years ago.

Right in the ballpark  of Lucy's life. These have been dubbed the Lomekwi assemblage and are currently the oldest  deliberately modified stone tools ever found. Bones of animals, likely ungulates and bovids,  have also been unearthed bearing cut marks from an astonishing 3.

4 million years ago. This  evidence suggests that Lucy's diet could have been supplemented by quite a bit of meat  and that she was creating tools to access it. This raises some really fascinating questions.

First, how did they acquire this meat? Lucy was  only about one meter tall and was not likely to be a great sprinter so hunting large and fast animals  was probably not easy for her. Could troops of australopithecines have bullied faster predators  off their kills?

It's certainly possible. Troops of other primates can be highly aggressive.  So aggressive that if lucy's life was anything like a chimpanzees then another major challenge  was probably avoiding other australopiths.

Lucy could have also been scavenging meat off  carcasses of abandoned prey. Large predators like lions often leave a lot of meat on the bones and  that doesn't even include the bone marrow inside. Perhaps australopiths like Lucy were developing  stone tools to strip the bones of small slivers of meat or use them to smash through  the long bones to get to the marrow.

Instead of competing with top predators, Lucy was probably  fending off other scavengers like vultures. The second important question is, what was going  on in Lucy's brain? If our interpretation of the evidence is correct and hominins like  lucy were making modified stone tools, then it suggests something dramatic had  shifted in the brains of australopiths compared to other apes.

Lucy's brain would have  been a similar size to a modern chimpanzees, just marginally bigger on average. Yet chimpanzees  in studies have so far been unable or unwilling to produce modified stone tools and even seem  unable to use a sharp flake to open a box containing food. So even though the change  between the two skulls is small, something dramatic was going on underneath.

The brains  of australopiths were perhaps being rewired. Another incredible artifact that allows us to get  a glimpse inside lucy's brain is the intriguing Makapansgat cobble. This cobble was  found in a cave in South Africa in layers dated to 2.

95 million years ago that  also contained the remains of australopiths. Curiously this rock is several kilometers  away from where it would be naturally, perhaps as far as 32 kilometers. It's probably  too big to be carried in by the by a bird, in the stomach of a bird, and the cave showed no evidence  of flooding that could have brought it in.

No one can really deny this rock really triggers  that sense within us that likes to find faces, pariedolia. This ability is definitely not unique  to us. Chimpanzees process faces in a similar way to humans.

Many animals have evolved this sense  out of simple self-preservation. Spotting faces ultimately reduces the chances of being bitten  by them. It is possible that this rock stood out to an australopith.

That something about the  rock said "hey take me home let's go back to the cave". Again suggesting that something was really  changing in the brains of australopiths. This is especially interesting because so far endocasts  of australopith brains and chimpanzee brains have shown little difference in organization. 

So the change must have been incredibly subtle, but very significant. Perhaps all of our artistic  expression and creativity ultimately has its roots in a simple moment of curiosity by  an australopith like Lucy. Lucy was not simply an upright walking ape, she was taking  the first tentative steps towards becoming human.

One of the major events in Lucy's  life might have been giving birth. This was probably quite difficult for Lucy. The  combination of upright walking, which narrowed our hips, and slowly increasing brain size was  probably starting to put a strain on pregnant women.

Baby australopiths would have probably  had to rotate slightly to pass through the birth canal. This meant that giving birth was certainly  harder than it had been earlier in our evolution and therefore might have become  a more collaborative process. Instead of Lucy giving birth on her own like a  chimpanzee does commonly, she could have been surrounded by other women, perhaps her own mother,  assisting her in bringing new life into the world.

Who knows what effect this increased collaboration  had on our evolution? Usually when we imagine increased cooperation in our prehistoric ancestors  we picture them hunting together but that's just one way we cooperate and the increasing  difficulty of giving birth could have been an extremely significant factor in our evolution,  in the evolution of our complex social systems. How much of a role Lucy's baby daddy played in  raising children is subject to huge debate.

The issue revolves around the size differences  between males and females, called sexual dimorphism. In primates, species that have a  high degree of sexual dimorphism tend to live in societies where there is one massive guy trying  to have all the sex with all the women and play a little role in the raising of children. Silverback  gorillas and mandrills are two perfect examples.

Absolute beasts! Compared to other apes, humans  don't have a high degree of sexual dimorphism and males tend to be very involved in the raising  of children. Some studies of australopithecus afarensis have come to the conclusion that there  was a high degree of dimorphism.

Others have argued that the degree of dimorphism is similar  to humans and that therefore males were more involved in family life. In support of this idea,  australopithecines seem to have developed slower and had longer childhoods than our modern ape  cousins, probably because they might have had to learn how to produce stone tools and live  slightly more complex lives. So more investment was probably required from somebody and that could  have been dad, who knows?

It's just hard to say for sure because we don't have a perfectly  preserved male and female australopith so all these estimates are based on reconstructions.  The specimens we do have are not only incomplete but also separated by hundreds of thousands of  years, plenty of time for a species to change. Whatever happened in the twists and turns  of lucy's life at some point, of course she died, she's dead, spoiler alert. 

Judging from the fractures on her bones, some have suggested that she  died from falling. Though others contend that these fractures could  have been caused by large animals. Either way, her death was probably sincerely  mourned by her family.

Humans, of course, we grieve for our dead even chimpanzees  grief for their dead, especially infants, even staying by their side for days. As the evidence suggests that australopits might  have formed even closer bonds, we can only imagine the pain that they would have felt watching over  her body. Little would they know we would still be watching over Lucy more than 3 million years  later.

Captivated by the stories she can tell, not just of herself but of the  origins of everyone alive today.