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Human ancestors spent more time in trees: Study
Saturday October 27, 2012 09:51:08 AM,
IANS
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London: Our early
human ancestors spent much of their time in trees long after they
fully mastered the art of walking on two legs, according to a
study.
This came to light after the remains of a three-year-old girl who
died about 3.3 million years ago in East Africa were found.
The discovery appears to have ended the debate over whether this
bipedal hominid still continued to climb trees, much like their
earlier ape ancestors, The Independent reported Friday.
The fossilised shoulder blades and arm sockets belonging to Selam,
meaning "peace", indicate that she and her family continued to
climb trees like modern apes even though her lower body was
perfectly adapted to upright walking.
This means that humanity's earliest ancestors abandoned an
arboreal existence far later in our evolutionary history than
previously thought, the newspaper said.
Selam is a remarkably well-preserved specimen of the species
Australopithecus afarensis, an important forerunner of the human
lineage.
Her almost-complete skull and skeleton, embedded in sandstone
rock, was discovered in 2000 in Dikika region of Ethiopia.
And it has taken years of painstaking work for scientists at the
California Academy of Scientists to extract the fossilised bones
from the stone, the daily said.
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