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. “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 . 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. 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. “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. “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. 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. 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. "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."
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.