Kind: captions
Language: en
where did we come from and how did human
beings evolve the discovery of a 3
million-year-old skeleton in the
Ethiopian desert dramatically changed
the way that scientists thought about
how we became human and guess what that
skeleton is
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named Lucy in 1974 paleoanthropologist
Donald Johansson spotted a forearm bone
sticking out of the Sandy Hills of Hadar
Ethiopia
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they named it Lucy after the famous
Beetle song that played as they
celebrated the discovery scientists
still debate her place in the Human
family Tree some think Lucy may be a
great great great ant to modern humans
rather than a direct ancestor but the
importance of her Discovery profoundly
changed our understanding of human
evolution Lucy was around 3 and 1/2 ft
tall and although she had long arms
strong shoulders and curved fingers
allowed her to thrive in the trees the
shapes of her leg bones and pelvis
indicate that she walked upright on two
legs Lucy died around age 15 or 16 at
which point she was already a full adult
the jury is still out on her cause of
death and her fossils are so old and
weather that we may never know for sure
what happened but compressive fractures
to her Bon suggest that she might have
fallen out of a tree she lived and died
nearly 3.2 million years ago about 2.9
Million Years before modern humans first
appeared in Africa
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for years scientists thought that we
develop larger brains as we began
walking upright and this ability evolves
that way we could free our hands to use
weapons but Lucy even though she walked
upright Had a Brain no larger than that
of a chimpanzee her Discovery
revolutionized our understanding of
human evolution because it suggested
that increased intelligence came after
not before we took our first steps
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