User:DigLit

Earliest Child Found

The bones of a three year old girl were found in Ethiopia. She belongs to a species called Australopithecus afarensis, and she happens to be the best fossil of her species. At 3.3 million years old the baby, named Dikika, has fingers, a foot, and a complete torso, but the most striking difference between her and previous fossils found is that she has a face. This small collection of bones sheds light on the evolution of hominins (humans and their ancestors).

Many other hominins have been found in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley. This is a very difficult region to hunt for fossils because of the intense heat, flash floods, malaria, shoot-outs between rival ethnic groups, and dangerous animals. However, this is the area that is most abundant in fossils. This particular area in Africa’s Great Rift Valley is called the Afar depression and has been the site of expeditions for decades, but in 1999 a group of Ethiopian fossil hunters strayed from this area into the Afar badlands. At first they just found fossils of many mammals such as, elephants and rhinoceroses, but they persevered because they knew if these animals survived in this area then early hominins could have as well. At last, they encountered a tiny face buried in a dusty slope. Underneath her perfectly conditioned head was a hard ball of sandstone that contained many of her upper body bones. Instead of piecing together hundreds of fragments of bone, they had to slowly etch away hard sandstone with a drill. These findings were so precious and the task was so tedious that it has taken five years to date.

The baby proved to be a mixture of the ape species and the human species. Her upper body mostly resembled an ape in that she had a small brain, a flat nose, a long projecting face, and shoulder blades that resembled those of a young gorilla. Her lower body, however, was more humanlike; she had humanlike knees and a kneecap, and the angle of her femur from knee to hip is close to that of a modern human. This suggests that although her upper body shows that she probably did some climbing, she also walked on two legs. Since apelike feet had to evolve to support and propel and upright body they lost the ability to grasp objects and therefore they could not cling to their mothers; this suggests that infants, like Dikika, were carried. Also, where her throat used to be, a hyoid bone was found, a bone that became crucial to human speech; the discovery of this bone gives us a snapshot of the evolution of the human voice box. Her brain suggests the beginnings of human childhood. Her brain volume was about the same as a chimp the same age and much smaller than a human’s at that age. However, her adult brain would have been larger than a chimp’s which suggests that brain growth in Australopithecus afarensis was already starting to take longer.

I find it fascinating that we have fossils of our ancestors and therefore snapshots of our evolution. I find that such evidence would make it hard for someone to write off evolution altogether. Although such evidence is suggestive and not necessarily concrete it is hard to dismiss it as coincidence. I find it harder to believe that we were simply placed on this earth possessing large brains and the gift to reason; I think that if a notion is easy for us to explain then it is too simple to be true. I believe that we do have a divine Creator and that he is the great force behind the phenomenon of evolution. This is not to say that evolution is the answer to our creation. I do not believe that we will ever figure it out because I do not believe that it is for us to know. I simply believe it is necessary to respect evolution and our ancestors for the consequences and sacrifices they endured for us to be at the point we are now: mastering technologies, building civilizations, even exploring our own origins.

Sloan, Christopher P. "The Origin of Childhood". National Geographic (Nov. 2006).