Lucy, our renowned hominin relative, died some 3.18 million years ago after plummeting from a tree, according to researchers from the University of Texas at Austin. A new analysis of the fossil—conducted more than 40 years after its discovery in what is now Hadar, Ethiopia—has revealed a pattern of distinctive fractures that, the scientists claim, points to a fall from great heights.

“I have taught this fossil since I was a grad student in the 1980s,” says John Kappelman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study, which was published Monday in Nature. “I knew these fractures were there, I just never thought to ask what had caused them. No one, as far as I know, has ever put out a theory of how she died.”

This theory, however, is already provoking controversy. Some researchers remain unconvinced, arguing that the cracks in Lucy’s bones formed long after her death.

“The kind of breakage that we are looking at on these bones is consistent with the kind of bone damage on almost all of the other fossils at Hadar—elephant fossils, rhino fossils, monkey fossils,” says Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University who is credited with discovering and naming Lucy. “And they are undoubtedly the result of geological forces acting on the bones after they are buried during the process of fossilization.”

Breaking Bad

Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, was discovered in 1974. About 40 percent of the skeleton had been preserved, making her one of the most complete hominin fossils ever found.

At the time of discovery, the researchers noted a considerable amount of damage to the bones—which they attributed to weathering and other fossilization processes—but they had inadequate evidence to speculate on the cause of death.

“There is one small tooth mark on Lucy’s pelvis that was obvious from the beginning,” says Johanson, “but there were no carnivore marks on the rest of the skeleton.”

View Images Each one of Lucy's bones was scanned, producing 35,000 detailed images. Photograph by Marsha Miller, UT Austin

But in 2008, Kappelman and his team were able to get their hands on the rock star fossil while she was on tour at museums in the United States. They conducted CT scans of each of the bones, and, in a protracted process that lasted the next eight years, his team meticulously analyzed the 35,000 digital slices the scans generated.

“It was looking at those scans and the way that her skeleton was built that these unusual fractures came to light,” says Kappelman.

According to Kappelman, while bones break naturally over time postmortem, they usually fracture across the bone—analogous to a dry stick being snapped in half. A closer examination of Lucy, however, revealed fractures that he claims are far more common in living bone.

For example, the researchers observed hinge, or greenstick, fractures, in which one side of the bone breaks while the other remains intact; similar to what happens when you try to snap a small healthy tree branch.

The scientists also noticed that tiny bone fragments that splintered during the fracture remained lodged in the bone cracks.

This finding, Kappelman argues, provides additional evidence that the fractures took place in living tissue, since breaks in dried bone likely would have dispersed these tiny fragments on the ground nearby.

And because these fractures showed no signs of healing, the team concluded that Lucy sustained these injuries in a fatal traumatic event.

View Images With 40 percent of her skeleton recovered, Lucy is one of the most complete hominin fossils ever found. She is named Lucy after the well-known Beatles song, which her discoverers were listening to the day she was found. Photograph by Jenny Vaughan, AFP/Getty

Up On High

Additional evidence points to a scenario of a terrifying fall.

Notably, her right shoulder has distinctive compression fractures that are characteristic of someone extending their arms as they plummet to the ground.

“I showed the evidence to an orthopedic surgeon, who immediately said it is a fracture caused by a fall from considerable height—there was no question at all,” says Kappelman. “I have now had nine surgeons look at this who all agree.”

Kappelman and his team then scrupulously examined fractures in the rest of Lucy’s skeleton, creating 3-D models to digitally dissect or recreate certain components. Their analysis revealed a cohesive pattern in her ankle, knee, shoulders, and wrist that they are convinced points to a fall from a significant height that would provide the force necessary to break her bones.

Based on studies of fossilized mammals and pollen, as well as geology in Lucy’s environs, the researchers knew that the area probably had been grass-covered woodland on a flat floodplain with plenty of large trees capable of facilitating the fateful accident.

Kappelman and his colleagues speculated that small hominins like Lucy, who stood a mere one meter (three and a half feet) tall and weighed around 27 kilograms (60 pounds), likely nested in the trees at night to protect themselves from potential predators.

By analyzing previous studies of chimpanzee nesting patterns, the team showed that Lucy would probably have climbed around 14 meters (45 feet) out of harm’s way—which, for us, would be equivalent to ascending a four to five story building. According to their calculations, a fall from this height could result in speeds exceeding 37 miles (60 kilometers) an hour, which, when combined with Lucy’s weight, would produce a force sufficient enough to be fatal.

The researchers have “come up with what strikes me as the most plausible explanation for the breakage—mainly a fall from considerable height onto a very solid surface,” says David Pilbeam, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University who advised Kappelman on his dissertation 30 years ago.

Not everyone, however, is convinced that the evidence points to this scenario. In particular, some scientists fault Kappelman for failing to consider other possible explanations.

“These authors make no effort to test the alternative hypothesis that these cracks and other breaks were made during the processes of fossilization and erosion,” says Timothy White, a paleoanthropologist and professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “In fact, the authors appear to have focused only on the cracks that they could attribute to an imagined fall, ignoring the additional abundant cracks on Lucy and other fossils.”

Johanson is likewise skeptical. “My reticence about the [study] is that in some ways it is a narrative, a just-so story,” he says. “Something that you can’t verify and you can’t falsify and is therefore unprovable.”

Ape and Human Features

If Kappelman’s research were to become widely accepted, the findings could help settle a long-standing debate: Were hominins like Lucy tree climbers?

Australopithecus afarensis displays both ape and human features, leading some paleoanthropologists to believe that Lucy probably spent time both in the trees and on the ground.

For example, her curved fingers and long arms are specialized for tree climbing while her shoulder blades are oriented for overhead movement of the arms that are reminiscent of apes. Yet she also displays several features seen in early humans, including an anatomy clearly suited for upright walking, leading other researchers to conclude that she spent all of her time on the ground.

Lucy’s theoretical fall could indicate that her species wasn’t suited to climb trees or that she was, at least, semiarboreal.

“It doesn’t strike me as particularly surprising that Australopithecus was using trees even if they weren’t optimally designed to do so, nor is it very surprising that they occasionally fell out of them,” says Pilbeam. “Chimps fall out of trees, gibbons fall out of trees. The notion that apes and monkeys are perfectly adapted to life in the trees is not correct.”

“I think that there is some evolutionary baggage left over from arboreal life and that we are catching a species in transition,” says Johanson. “I wouldn’t think it’s impossible that they went into the trees to collect fruit or maybe even to build nests to sleep at night, but in terms of their primary mode of locomotion, these guys were essentially terrestrial.”

For his part, Kappelman will continue to analyze other aspects of Lucy’s skeleton and may even look for her fracture pattern in different fossils found in the area. In the meantime, he says, the research has made him see Lucy in a new way.

“At one point, I had all these bones out and this idea just finally crystalized—I could see the fall, the position of her body when she hit, the impact,” says Kappelman. “For the very first time, I saw her as an individual and this wave of empathy hit me. For the first time she was not just an isolated box of broken bones. I could actually picture how she died.”</s>Scans of the world's most-famous fossil have been released in an effort to establish how the ape-like human relative perished 3.18 million years ago.

The fossil, known fondly as Lucy, was discovered by researchers in Ethopia back in 1974. She was named after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which was on heavy rotation on the radio at the time.

Around 40% of Lucy's skeleton was recovered at the time, making her one of the most complete australopithecine fossils ever found.

She is the closest primate to the homo genus. Homo Sapiens began walking the earth around 200,000 years ago.

Her skeletal remains are kept in a National Museum in Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa and her plasticreplica is kept in the public for tourists to observe.

Scans of the hominin creature's arm, shoulder and knee bones are now available to download in accompaniment to a paper from Nature alleging that Lucy died after falling from a tree.
• Who is Lucy the Australopithecus? Google honours 41st anniversary of skeletal discovery

The team hope the public will 3D print the bones from the scans to test the hypothesis.

“It’s one thing for me to describe it in detail in paper, but it’s another thing to hold these things, to be able to print them out, look at them and put them together,” team leader John Kappelman, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin told Nature .

Lucy's remains were first scanned during 2008 over a 10 day period in Austin.

Examination of the bone fractures revealed extensive damage to her left shoulder, pelvis, right ankle and knee, suggesting a fall from a tree taller than 10 metres.

The bones linked to her right shoulder also sustained a series of clean breaks which echoed those orthopaedic surgeons saw as a result of patients attempting to break a fall with an outstretched arm.
• Google Doodle: 5 things you didn't know about the Lucy Australopithecus fossil

“Here’s the most famous fossil on the planet, the centre of the debate over arborealism in human evolution, and we think it’s most likely she died from a fall out of tree,” said Mr Kappelman.

Marc Meyer, a palaeoanthropologist at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California, refutes the claim. Had Lucy fallen from a tree, she would have sustained a broken spine in the same way chimpanzees do when falling from a comparable height, he said.

The research team who discovered Lucy believed her bones were broken after she had already died.</s>Fall from a tree may have caused death of 'Lucy' the famed fossil

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Lucy, one of the best known ancestors of humans to ever roam the earth, may have died after a fall from a tree, University of Texas researchers said on Monday after studying her 3.18-million-year-old fossilized remains.

A high resolution X-ray CT (computed tomography) study of Lucy, a female hominid, indicates she suffered fractures to her right humerus not typically seen in fossils. There were also less severe fractures on the left shoulder and other compressive fractures throughout the skeleton, they said.

The injuries were consistent with those "caused by a fall from considerable height when the conscious victim stretched out an arm in an attempt to break the fall," according to the research from John Kappelman, a University of Texas anthropology and geological sciences professor, who consulted with Stephen Pearce, an orthopedic surgeon at Austin Bone and Joint Clinic.

"This compressive fracture results when the hand hits the ground during a fall, impacting the elements of the shoulder against one another to create a unique signature on the humerus," Kappelman said in a statement.

Lucy's skeleton was unearthed in 1974 in Ethiopia and since then researchers around the world have been looking at the fossil of the hominid to find its links to modern humans.

Kappelman speculated Lucy, who was about 3 feet, 6 inches (107 cms) in height, foraged and sought nightly refuge in trees. Her injuries indicate she fell from a height of about of more than 40 feet (12 meters).

University of Texas researchers, including Kappelman, in 2009 completed the first high resolution CT scan of Lucy when the fossil toured the United States. The study resulted in some 35,000 CT electronic slices, which were then studied by university researchers.

"When the extent of Lucy's multiple injuries first came into focus, her image popped into my mind's eye, and I felt a jump of empathy across time and space," Kappelman said.

"Lucy was no longer simply a box of bones but in death became a real individual: a small, broken body lying helpless at the bottom of a tree." (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by David Gregorio)</s>LOS ANGELES -- The famous human ancestor known as Lucy walked the Earth, but it was her tree climbing that might have led to her demise, a new study suggests.

An analysis of her partial skeleton reveals breaks in her right arm, left shoulder, right ankle and left knee -- injuries that researchers say resulted from falling from a high perch such as a tree.

Lucy likely died quickly, said John Kappelman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who published the findings Monday in the journal Nature.

"I don't think she suffered," Kappelman said.

But several other researchers, including Lucy's discoverer, disagree. They contend most of the cracks in Lucy's bones are well documented and came after her death from the fossilization process and natural forces such as erosion.

How Lucy met her end has remained a mystery since her well-preserved fossil remains were unearthed more than four decades ago. Her discovery was significant because it allowed scientists to establish that ancient human ancestors walked upright before evolving a big brain.

Lucy was a member of Australopithecus afarensis, an early human species that lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago. The earliest humans climbed trees and walked on the ground. Lucy walked upright and occasionally used her long, dangling arms to climb trees. She was a young adult when she died.

Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, called the study's conclusion a "misdiagnosis." The Texas researchers "appear to have focused only on the cracks that they could attribute to an imagined fall, ignoring the additional abundant cracks," White said in an email.

The split highlights the difficulty of pinpointing a cause of death from fossilized remains. Scientists rarely know how early humans died because skeletons are incomplete and bones tend to get crushed under sand and rocks.

Over the years, Lucy's discoverer Donald Johanson has tried to solve the mystery.

Lucy's skeleton, which is 40 per cent complete, was recovered in Ethiopia in what was an ancient lake near fossilized remains of crocodiles, turtle eggs and crab claws.

"There's no definitive proof of how she died," said Johanson of Arizona State University.

The Texas team examined Lucy's bones and used high-tech imaging. Kappelman said the scans revealed multiple broken bones and no signs of healing, suggesting the injuries occurred around the time of death.

He reconstructed her final moments: The 3-foot-6-inch (1.06-meter) Lucy fell from at least 40 feet and hit the ground at 35 mph. She landed on her feet before twisting and falling. Such an impact would have caused internal organ damage. Fractures on her upper arms suggest she tried to break her fall.

Kappelman theorized that Lucy's walking ability may have caused her to be less adept at climbing trees, making her more vulnerable to falling from heights.

Not everyone agrees that her tree-climbing skills were lacking. Other scientists point out that there have been documented falls by chimpanzees and orangutans, which spend more time in trees than Lucy's species.

"Without a time machine, how can one know that she didn't just get unlucky and fall?" William Harcourt-Smith of the American Museum of Natural History said in an email.</s>The ancient human ancestor known as Lucy may have met her death more than 3m years ago when she tumbled out of a tree and crashed to the woodland floor, a team of US researchers claim.

A fresh analysis of the “grandmother of humanity” points out a number of cracks in the fossil bones that the scientists say match traumatic fractures seen in humans who suffer serious injuries from high falls on to hard ground.



“The consistency of the pattern of fractures with what we see in fall victims leads us to propose that it was a fall that was responsible for Lucy’s death,” said John Kappelman, an anthropologist who led the study at the University of Texas in Austin. “I think the injuries were so severe that she probably died very rapidly after the fall.”



But the claims, published in the prestigious journal Nature, were roundly dismissed by scientists who spoke to the Guardian. They point out that a lot can happen to a skeleton in 3.2m years. Lucy’s body may have been trampled by stampeding beasts before sediment covered the bones and gradually encased them in rock.



“There is a myriad of explanations for bone breakage,” said Donald Johanson at Arizona State University, who discovered Lucy more than 40 years ago in the Afar region of Ethiopia. “The suggestion that she fell out of a tree is largely a “just-so story” that is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, and therefore unprovable.”



Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California in Berkeley, said the cracks were no more than routine fossil damage. “If paleontologists were to apply the same logic and assertion to the many mammals whose fossilised bones have been distorted by geological forces, we would have everything from gazelles to hippos, rhinos, and elephants climbing and falling from high trees,” he said.



Lucy was discovered in 1974 when Johanson and his student, Tom Gray, were searching for ancient animal bones on the parched terrain near the village of Hadar in northern Ethiopia. The chance finding of a piece of arm bone led them to uncover more remains of an ape-like animal. Eventually, they gathered about 40% of the skeleton.



That evening as the team celebrated at camp the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds came on providing the scientists with a name for their discovery. The species, Australopithecus afarensis, meaning “southern Ape from Afar”, walked upright, but had long, strong arms and curved fingers, making Lucy more adept at life in the trees than modern humans.



Kappelman became intrigued by some of the cracks in Lucy’s bones after examining high resolution x-ray scans of the fossils. The cracks had been described before and put down to natural processes such as erosion and fossilisation. But Kappelman thought there might be another explanation.

Working with Stephen Pearce, an orthopaedic surgeon, the scientists identified cracks in more than a dozen bones, ranging from the skull and spine to the ankles, shins, knees and pelvis, which look like compressive fractures sustained in a fall. One injury to the right shoulder matches the kind of fracture seen when people instinctively put their arms out to save themselves, the scientists believe. Kappelman calls it “a unique signature” for a fall and evidence that the individual was conscious at the time.



From the scientists’ calculations, Lucy, who weighed less than 30kg, could have suffered similar injuries in a fall from about 15 metres. If Australopithecus afarensis climbed trees to nest, the animals could have spent hours a day at this or even greater heights. “We know that chimps fall out of trees and often it’s because they step on a branch that turns out to be rotten, and boom, down they come,” said Kappelman.

“Based on clinical literature these are severe trauma events. We have not been able to come up with a reasonable way that these could be fractured postmortem with the bones lying on the surface or even if the dead body was being trampled on. If somebody is trampled on the bone breaks in a different way. It doesn’t break compressively,” said Kappelman.



But Johanson is not impressed. The cracks on Lucy’s bones are similar to the damage seen on other early human and ancient mammal fossils throughout Africa and the rest of the world, he said. “We don’t know how long the fossilisation process takes, but the enormous set of forces placed on the bones during the build up of sediments covering the bones is a significant factor in promoting damage and breakage,” he added.



One of White’s major complaints is that the scientists fail to prove beyond doubt that the cracks in Lucy’s bones occurred around the time of death. “Such defects created by natural geological forces of sediment pressure and mineral growth are very common in fossil assemblages. They often confuse clinicians and amateurs who imagine them to have happened around the time of death,” White said. “Every single element of the Lucy fossil has cracks. The authors cherry pick the ones that they imagine to be evidence of a fall from a tree, leaving the others unexplained and unexamined.”



Kappelman concedes that we can never know for sure what happened. “None of us were there. We didn’t see Lucy die,” he said. “Thinking about testing this idea, it’s hard to get someone to fall out of a tree, but we have tests going on every single day in every emergency room on planet Earth when people walk in with fractures from falls,” he said.



In pondering Lucy’s death, she came back to life, Kappelman added. For the first time she became a living, breathing individual, because I could understand what I propose to be her death. We have all fallen down. For an instant in time you can identify with her and imagine exactly what this individual, who lived over 3m years ago, was doing at that instant.”</s>Her last living act is a familiar one: She reaches out with her hands to break her fall before hitting the unforgiving earth. Bones shattered, she dies alone.

Some researchers say they now know how Lucy died: by falling out of a tree. But other scientists say the story is nothing but a tall tale.

Lucy's skeleton has been studied at length since she was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. As one of the oldest and most complete hominid fossils ever found, Lucy's skeleton provides quite a bit of information on how she lived. She walked upright, showing an intriguing mix of modern and ancestral skeletal traits that would have made her bipedal while other primates swung from the trees. We know that she was a fully mature adult when she died, although she was no bigger than a 4- or 5-year-old of our own species. She was very likely a vegetarian.

But in a study published Monday in Nature Communications, researchers did something new - they tried to puzzle out how she died.

The research comes out of a marathon of X-ray scanning. Lucy's skeleton is usually kept in Ethiopia, but during a 2008 United States museum tour, researchers at the University of Texas were able to borrow her for 10 days. They used the opportunity to scan her with the Jackson School of Geosciences' High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility (UTCT) - a machine designed to scan through materials as solid as a rock (as old as it is, Lucy's skeleton is totally mineralized) and at a higher resolution than medical scans.

"We scanned nonstop, 24/7, for 10 days," lead author John Kappelman, a University of Texas at Austin anthropology and geological sciences professor, told The Washington Post. "We were exhausted. I was happy to see her come, but I was happy to see her go."

When bones sit around for upward of 3 million years, they tend to break. A lot. But in studying Lucy's remains in new detail, Kappelman and his colleagues thought they saw evidence of breaks that had occurred before death. They believed they could see compression fractures -- caused when force presses bones against one another so hard they break - and greenstick fractures, where the bone partially bends and partially breaks (much as a fresh, living twig will splinter and twist instead of snapping in two). The former is usually a sign of a traumatic impact, not the wear and tear of life as a fossil, and the latter only occurs on fresh, living bone.

To Kappelman, this was a clear sign that the traumatic fractures occurred during Lucy's life. And when he went looking for possible causes of these fractures in the medical literature, he found what many orthopedic surgeons have told him is a perfect match: The injury to her shoulder looked just like a four-part proximal humerus fracture.

When people fall and put their arms out to break the impact, force is transmitted along the long axis of the arm, compressing the components of the shoulder against one another. If that force is high enough, the head of the shoulder blade acts as an anvil, shattering and compressing the components of the proximal humerus, or top of the upper arm bone.

"Orthopedic surgeons see these breaks day in and day out all over the planet," Kappelman said. He's had something like 10 specialists take a look at Lucy's big break.

"To the person, it's not like, 'Oh, you know, there's a chance.' They say, 'This is what it is; we see it in our practice all the time.' We have been able to demonstrate that these are matches to what is widely seen in the literature in patients recovering from a fall," he said.

Once his team went looking for fractures in Lucy's skeleton that could have resulted from a devastating fall, they found loads: An ankle fracture known as a pilon, usually caused by falls or motor vehicle accidents; high-energy traumatic fractures to both knees; signs that bones in her legs dislocated and rammed up into the joints above them; a fracture to the first rib, which is well protected by the collar bone and usually not broken except in cases of traumatic impact.

But other paleontologists aren't so sure.

"I've worked in Eastern Africa at these sites for many years, and there's hardly a fossil out there that doesn't have damage like Lucy has," said William Kimbel, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Kimbel, who wasn't involved in the new study, doesn't agree that the fractures on Lucy's bones are greenstick - and without this distinction, he doesn't think the paper does a sufficient job of proving they came from an injury before death.

"If you roam the area, you'll see this type of damage on all types of bones from all kinds of sources, from hares to hippos," he scoffed.

Kimbel's ASU colleague Donald Johanson -- a member of the team that discovered Lucy - agreed. "The only green fracture I see on the skeleton is a small indented pit on Lucy's pelvis in the pubic region," he said - a fracture already identified as a possible sign that a carnivore took a swipe at Lucy, perhaps just after she died (as there is no other evidence that she was attacked).

As the University of Texas study hinges on the idea that these fractures are clearly signs of trauma - something Kimbel and Johanson vehemently disagree with, and that can't really be proven - they point out that the "research" that follows is just a story.

The research team's conclusion that Lucy likely fell from a tree, specifically - a conclusion they came to by estimating the force of a fall from the heights at which chimpanzees and other primates typically nest in trees - only makes the study harder to swallow for some paleontologists. It is, once again, impossible to prove or disprove. And Lucy's relationship with trees is somewhat controversial.

"From the waist down, Lucy's bones are clearly adapted to a terrestrial, bipedal walking. But from the waist up, Lucy has an upper body that looks like that of any tree-climbing ape," said Dartmouth anthropologist Nathaniel J. Dominy, who wasn't involved in the new study. "Everyone agrees that Lucy walked upright, but did she climb trees occasionally or never at all?"

This debate was once so acrimonious, Dominy explained, that researchers used to have to pick sides and stick to them. Dominy (and many other paleontologists) now take the moderate view: Of course Lucy could climb trees, just as humans can climb them today. And if she had that skill, as a tiny herbivore living in a world of big predators, she no doubt would have hoisted herself up into the trees once or twice for protection or to find food. But we have no way of knowing whether she and her ilk regularly climbed to great heights.

"The a priori assumption that Lucy spent much time in the trees is not supported," Johanson said.</s>It’s the coldest case in science, and it may have just been cracked.

Forty years after researchers discovered Lucy, an early human ancestor who lived 3.2 million years ago, scientists think they now know how she died.

After examining high-resolution CT scans of broken bones in Lucy’s right shoulder, as well as the damage to other parts of her skeleton, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin propose that the small hominid’s life ended shortly after a catastrophic fall from a great height — probably from a tree.

“What we see is a pattern of fractures that are well documented in cases of people who have suffered a severe fall,” said John Kappelman, a UT professor of anthropology and geological sciences. “This wouldn’t happen if you just fell over.”

In a paper published Monday in Nature, Kappelman and his colleagues suggest that Lucy tumbled out of a tree, landed hard on her feet and then pitched forward, extending her arms straight out in front of her in a desperate attempt to break her fall.

The force of the impact of her hands hitting the ground is likely responsible for the debilitating compression fracture in her shoulder, the authors write. But the fall also caused several bones in her body to break and probably lead to severe organ damage. Death would have followed swiftly.

If their hypothesis is correct, Lucy was likely conscious in the last few moments before she died.

“She did exactly what we would do,” Kappelman said. “She was trying to save her life.”

Lucy was discovered in 1974 by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson in the Hadar area of central Ethiopia. Johanson and his colleagues named the fossil after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" because it was playing over and over again at their camp the night she was found.

Part of what made the Lucy find so important was her unusual mix of features. She had relatively short legs and long arms like a chimpanzee, but her wide pelvis indicated that she walked upright. This combination of traits suggests her species, Australopithecus afarensis, may have been a link between modern humans and our tree-living ancestors.

Lucy was much smaller than modern humans. Although she was probably a full grown adult at the time of her death, she stood just 3 feet 6 inches tall, and weighed about 60 pounds — about the size of a first-grader.

Her fossilized remains have been studied by dozens of scientists, but this is the first study to hypothesize how she met her end. Kappelman said that’s because for the most part, ancient bones do not reveal how an animal died.

“Despite what you see on shows like ‘CSI,’ skeletons only rarely preserve evidence of death,” he said. “If we didn’t see those arms sticking out, the argument we make might not be so powerful.”

Kappelman’s research into Lucy’s demise began in 2008, when the Ethiopian government granted him 10 days to scan the preserved parts of her skeleton at the high-resolution CT lab at the University of Texas.

Previous attempts to peer into the interior of Lucy’s bones in the late 1970s had failed because CT scanners at that time were not powerful enough.

“Lucy is a fully mineralized fossil, so she’s like a rock, and the problem with lower energy CT is that they can’t see through rock” Kappelman said. “Up until 2008, we had had no data at all on the internal structure of her bones. She was radiographically opaque.”

It was while he was scanning her right humerus, the upper arm bone, that Kappelman realized the fractures on the end of the bone closest to the shoulder were unlike anything he’d seen in other fossils.

Ancient fossils often break apart due to geological forces. For example, breaks could be caused by the tremendous pressure of rock that can build up on fossils over time. They can also fracture when shifts in the Earth’s crust tear them apart. But Kappelman thought the fissures in Lucy’s bones might have a different origin. Perhaps they they were due to an injury instead.

To check his hunch, he called Dr. Stephen Pearce, a friend of a friend and an orthopedic surgeon at the Austin Bone and Joint Clinic. Pearce agreed to take a look at a cast of Lucy’s right humerus bone in his medical office.

“It looked very distinctly like a proximal fracture we see pretty routinely as orthopedists, usually because of a fall off a ladder or scaffolding, or a car crash,” Pearce said. “I’m not an anthropologist, but it certainly looked like the fracture pattern you would see if she fell out of a tree.”

Over time, Kappelman showed his cast of the humerus to eight different orthopedic surgeons. All of them said it looked like a four-part proximal humerus fracture that occurs when a person puts out their hands to break a fall.

“It wasn’t like they were saying, ‘It might be this or it could be something else,’” Kappelman said. “It was not even a question from their perspective.”

But how could the researchers know that the event that caused the bone fractures also caused her death?

Kappelman and his co-authors argue that the fall could not have occurred much before Lucy died because the bone breaks were clean and showed no sign of healing.

They also say the injury could not have happened long after death because tiny slivers of bone that broke off in the impact remained in their post-injury position rather than scattering all over the ground. This could only happen if the fibrous tissue that forms a type of skin around the bone had not yet decayed, the authors said.

“Kappelman’s point is that these slivers of bone can only be accounted for if the fibrous tissue was still there, holding everything in place,” said Jack Stern, an anatomist and professor emeritus at Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the work. “That argument impressed me.”</s>(CNN) When Lucy, the world's most well-known fossil, was discovered sticking out of a shallow Ethiopian stream bed in 1974, she provided new insight about life for early human ancestors 3.18 million years ago. The image of her skeleton -- which is estimated to be 40% complete and considered the best representation of her species, Australopithecus afarensis -- became iconic.

But how did she come to rest in that shallow stream? Lucy just might be considered one of the world's oldest cold cases.

Forty-two years after the discovery, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin now believe that she was found in proximity to where she died.

"When we think about any of the fossils that we work on, we know in every instance that that came from an individual who was born, they grew up, and then they died," said John W. Kappelman, a professor of anthropology and lead author of a new study on Lucy. "But it's rarely the case that the skeleton actually preserves evidence of how an individual died. What we're proposing here is the first hypothesis that's out there, and we've had her for 42 years now, about how she died. I am not aware that anyone else has ever [done that]."

The original fossil and CT scans of fractures to her skeleton paint a more vivid portrait of what happened in Lucy's final moments, and although it was probably swift, it wasn't without pain. The new study that proposes the hypothesis reads like a coroner's report, making Lucy's stone-like bones seem more lifelike than ever.

Lucy was small, about 3½ feet tall and 60 pounds. Analysis of her skeleton and teeth shows she had reached maturity, but not unlike chimpanzees, her species matured young. Kappelman estimates she was 15 or 16 years old.

Given her size, predators such as hyenas, jackals and saber-toothed cats would have posed a threat to Lucy. So Lucy most likely turned to the trees, Kappelman said. It's possible she scaled them only from time to time for safety or that she nested in them every night. Based on data on the nesting habits of chimps, an average of 46 feet above the ground makes them feel safe.

She stood up straight, with feet, knees and hips that are similar to ours. If you saw her walking from afar, you would think Lucy was human by her silhouette. But up close, she had a small head, a brain comparable in size to a chimpanzee's, longer arms and hair covering her body.

Bridging the gap between humans and chimps, Lucy had slightly curved fingers and toes, with mobile ankles and shoulders that provided more overhead range of movement. Even with those abilities, she would have been better at walking than climbing.

Perhaps Lucy was spooked by a predator, or perhaps she was asleep or settling in for the night. Maybe she spied some fruit and wanted to forage. Either way, this is what Kappelman believes happened next.

From 46 feet in the air, Lucy fell out of her tree, fully conscious. She fell toward the ground rapidly at 35 mph and hit feet-first, sending an impact punching through her body that created fractures in her ankles, knees, hip and shoulder. Internal organs were probably punctured by this "hydraulic ram effect." Lucy pitched forward and instinctively put out her arms to break the fall, creating fractures in the bone there as well. It would probably be her final conscious act.

She twisted to her right, landing primarily on that side. That twist fractured her neck and tilted her head. Unconscious, broken and bleeding, she lay on the stream bed. If there was water present at the time, it gently moved the body a short distance along, naturally carrying her to a final resting place since members of her own species didn't.

Lucy's skeleton is represented by elements of her skull, upper limb, hand, axial skeleton, pelvis, lower limb and foot. Previously, researchers believed any damage or fractures within her bones simply happened over time as she became fossilized. The discovery of Lucy's skeleton has often been heralded as something of a miracle because as Kappelman points out, the geologic record isn't kind to bones over the years and it's difficult for them to last long enough to reach us.

But not all the fractures happened after death, Kappelman said. Using their High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility, the researchers scanned her entire skeleton to look deeper within the bone. Previous CT scans were more medical, with less resolution, and weren't able to penetrate the rocky nature of the skeleton.

There are clean breaks, and there are also intact tiny bone slivers. Had those occurred once the bone was dry and exposed to the elements, they would have broken off and dispersed.

Lucy's humerus fractures also bear the unique signature that orthopedic surgeons associate with falling injuries in the elderly or those who fall from great heights. In both cases, the patients instinctively stretch out their arms to break the fall. Kappelman consulted with nine orthopedic surgeons, and they all agreed on the fracture signature.

Overall, the fractures and bone-to-bone impact associated with her death prove to be severe, and Lucy had to have fallen from a great height to receive such trauma. This also indicates that while Lucy had the ability to reach great heights, she may not have been an adept climber simply due to her features.

"The point we argue is that it may well be the evolution of these traits for bipedalism [walking upright] that compromised her ability to climb as safely and efficiently in the trees, and that may have meant that her species was more subject to a higher frequency of falls," Kappelman said. Researchers have found other fossils of her species with similar fractures, suggesting more falls.

As a professor of anthropology, Kappelman also received training in human anatomy and went through medical and surgical rounds. He and his team regarded falling as one hypothesis and researched other causes, such as a seizure, a flood, a lightning strike or even a violent animal. But none of these matched as well with the fractures.

"We've done what we thought we could do in evaluating alternative hypotheses," he said. "This is most consistent and common with the impact from a fall. This hypothesis is more or less being tested every day in thousands of ERs everywhere when people have these injuries."

After 30 years of working with fossils, Kappelman was eager to scan Lucy's iconic bones, but he wasn't prepared for how he would feel after discerning her cause of death when he looked over her skeleton laid out on his desk. Falling is easy to imagine for anyone, and he could picture the progression of her injuries as she plummeted to her death and lay at the bottom of the tree.

"It really hit me for the first time," he said. "Here she was in her death, reaching her arms out to try instinctively just to break her fall. It was at that moment that these broken bits of bone that I've taught for 30 years became a living individual. And it gave me this feeling of empathy, because I could identify with this.

"It's like putting yourself there at someone's death and being able to picture that, almost as if understanding that drops us into a time machine and we fly back through 3 million years so we're there observing how this little individual died. It was in understanding her death that she became alive for me."</s>She is the longest-lived and best known example of one of our early human ancestors.

Now, the story of how the 3.18-million-year-old hominin 'Lucy' met her painful death is being unraveled by scientists.

By looking at fractures on Lucy's skeleton, researchers have solved prehistory's 'coldest case'.

They claim she died after falling out of a tree, offering unusual evidence for tree dwelling in the extinct species known as Australopithecus afarensis.

Since her discovery in the Afar region of Ethiopia in 1974, Lucy — a terrestrial biped — has been at the center of a debate about whether this ancient species also spent time in the trees.

'It is ironic that the fossil at the center of a debate about the role of arborealism in human evolution likely died from injuries suffered from a fall out of a tree,' said lead author John Kappelman, a University of Texas professor in anthropology.

Kappelman first studied Lucy during her US museum tour in 2008, when the fossil detoured to the High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility (UTCT).

The facility has a machine designed to scan through materials as solid as a rock and at a higher resolution than medical CT.

For 10 days, Kappelman and geological sciences professor Richard Ketcham scanned all of her 40-percent-complete skeleton to create a digital archive of more than 35,000 CT slices.

'Lucy is precious. There's only one Lucy, and you want to study her as much as possible,' Ketcham said.

'CT is nondestructive. So you can see what is inside, the internal details and arrangement of the internal bones.'

Studying Lucy and her scans, Kappelman noticed something unusual; the end of the right humerus was fractured in a manner not normally seen in fossils, preserving a series of sharp, clean breaks with tiny bone fragments and slivers still in place.

'This compressive fracture results when the hand hits the ground during a fall, impacting the elements of the shoulder against one another to create a unique signature on the humerus,' said Kappelman.

He then consulted Dr Stephen Pearce, an orthopedic surgeon at Austin Bone and Joint Clinic, using a modern human-scale, 3D printed model of Lucy.

Pearce confirmed that the injury was consistent with fracture caused by a fall from considerable height when the conscious victim stretched out an arm in an attempt to break the fall.

Kappelman also saw similar, less severe, fractures at the left shoulder and other compressive fractures throughout Lucy's skeleton.

Overall, Lucy suffered a broken ankle, arm, knee, pelvis and at least one fractured rib - suggesting she must have suffered severe internal organ damage.

These included a pilon fracture of the right ankle, a fractured left knee and pelvis.

The team also found even more subtle evidence such as a fractured first rib — 'a hallmark of severe trauma' — all consistent with fractures caused by a fall.

Without any evidence of healing, Kappelman said the breaks occurred near the time of death.

The question remained: How could Lucy have achieved the height necessary to produce such a high velocity fall and forceful impact?

Kappelman claims that because of her small size — about 3 feet 6 inches and 60 pounds — Lucy probably foraged and sought nightly refuge in trees.

In comparing her with chimpanzees, Kappelman argues Lucy probably fell from a height of more than 40 feet, hitting the ground at more than 35 miles per hour.

Based on the pattern of breaks, Kappelman suggests that she landed feet-first before bracing herself with her arms when falling forward, and 'death followed swiftly.'

'When the extent of Lucy's multiple injuries first came into focus, her image popped into my mind's eye, and I felt a jump of empathy across time and space,' Kappelman said.

'Lucy was no longer simply a box of bones but in death became a real individual: a small, broken body lying helpless at the bottom of a tree.'

It follows that Lucy must have climbed trees, the team said, possibly seeking refuge in the forest canopy at night.

But this versatility may also have precipitated her demise.

Physical features adapted for walking upright 'may have compromised her ability to climb trees, predisposing her species to more frequent falls,' said the researchers.

Using fracture patterns when present, future research may tell a more complete story of how ancient species lived and died.

The Ethiopian National Museum has provided access to a set of 3D files of Lucy's shoulder and knee for the public to download and print so that they can evaluate the hypothesis for themselves.

'This is the first time 3D files have been released for any Ethiopian fossil hominin, and the Ethiopian officials are to be commended,' Kappelman said.

'Lucy is leading the charge for the open sharing of digital data.'</s>The blog site "Rest-of-Texas-sucks. Com," an Austin based site, sneeringly refers to the remainder of Texas outside Austin as "A land of big oil, big business, big cars, big men with big mouths, big guns, big bigoted morons, and big-haired women who love stupid men."

Perhaps that's an exaggeration but Texas is big in many areas: it is the #1 state in lots of ways: Texans have the lowest percent of their population (25 and older) with a high school diploma coming in at 50th in the nation. That's being #1 in the great big Lone Star state!

Texas leads America in the percentage of children who are uninsured (1st) which is in keeping with the percentage of the total population without basic healthcare insurance (also at the top of the nation's list). #1, again! Not to be forgotten is that Texas executes more people yearly than any other state,#1! Texas is #1 in another area: it leads the nation in carbon dioxide emissions, toxic chemicals released into the water, cancer-causing carcinogens released into the air, and hazardous waste production.

Arguably Texas is #1 in assaults on women's reproductive rights. Since July 2013, about half of the state's 42 abortion clinics have closed do to restrictive laws in a hugely populated state. No one knows how many back alley abortions the laws have caused.

The state is brimming with guns. People are allowed to carry concealed weapons into mental hospitals - that's what the concealed carry law permits. A concealed "campus carry" law means it is fine to bring a Glock into a public university's dorm room - but not a waffle-maker! For several years it's been permissible to open carry assault weapons into places like Starbucks. Too, a law has been passed recently allowing another open carry -- of alcohol at Texas gun shows!

Turning to Austin, symbolic of the city is its favorite bumper sticker, " "Keep Austin Weird." It really isn't the hippie haven, reefer smoking capitol of the world its critics claim, but it is quite different from the rest of the state. Its liberal politicians make even Portland Oregon seem conservative.

One lover of the city writes, "If you took the best qualities of Palo Alto and Berkeley and put them together you'd have Austin, business friendly, innovative, successful, but laid back and without the high prices of the bay area. It's a place where hippies and techies happily live and play side by side."

It is understandable why Austin has gathered signatures from over 70% of voters in a local referendum to ask city government to secede from Texas and join California, the most progressive state in the union.

At first blush, the idea to secede seems ridiculous. The U.S. Constitution, Art. IV, sec. 3 clearly forbids the creating a new state in the territory of an existing one without the latter's consent, and the consent of Congress. But the provision does not govern the transfer of territory from one state to another, which seems to be constitutional. Too, There is no requirement that states be continuous, as Michigan's northern peninsula demonstrates.

Governor Jerry Brown of California said he would put a proposition on the ballot to see if its citizens wanted to annex Austin to California. Brown favors such a move. At a press conference yesterday he pointed out that the economy of Austin has been rated #1 in economic growth in American cities that it has been called the "Capitol Of live Music," a sign that it is culturally advanced, and has one of the best universities in the U.S. "And Just last year, over 25,000 people moved to Austin, bringing its total population to just below a million. Austin would be a great addition to our state," said California's liberal Governor.

"If a million people in Austin want to dissociate themselves from the rest of Texas, which has the most disgusting collection of Neanderthals in America, they should be welcomed by Californians," said Jerry Brown.
Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin postulate that the hominin fossil Lucy (Dinkinesh) died due to a fall from a tree. Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who is credited with discovering and naming Lucy, disagrees.