Friday, March 25, 2016

Lucy's Kind Had A Range That Extended Outside Africa's Rift Valley



The primate species Australopithecus afarensis for which the type fossil is "Lucy" was a diminutive archaic species intermediate between other great apes and modern humans (it isn't clear if this species was directly ancestral to modern humans or merely a cadet branch of the lineage) that existed roughly 3.7 million to 3 million years ago.

Previously, remains from this species had been found only in the African Rift Valley, but a new example of remains from this species in Kenya in  the outskirts of Nairobi demonstrates that Lucy's kind had a wider geographic and ecological range.

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