You may know my name is important in the anthropology community, but you may not know how I went from spending millions of years buried within the earth to a rising star. Here's the story about my rise to fame and the mystery of my decline.
My story begins in 1972 when Donald Johanson traveled to Ethiopia. This was his second trip to Ethiopia, and when he first found a knee joint. He returned in 1974 with hope that Hadar would be a promising site. Funny enough...he first found my ulna. Most people know this as the area where you get that funny, tingling feeling upon contact. As he and his team kept digging, they found parts of my cranium, mandible, ribs, pelvis, thighs, feet, etc. As the team began to study my skeleton, they learned many important facts that launched me into stardom.
In my post, Lucy: More than a Skeleton, I talk about how important my skeleton is in learning about the evolutionary timeline of bipedalism and modern brain size, but there are many other interesting things to note. They know my bones are unique to me because they did not find any duplicates. My bones also fossilized in the same manner, whereas if there were multiple fossils from different times or deposits, they would vary in color. They knew I was a female because of the small size of my bones. Hominins around this time period were sexually dimorphic and bones belonging to a male would be much larger. While I was approximately 3 foot five inches, a male of my species would have been closer to 5 foot, or a little shorter.
My bones also suggest an estimate of my age. Aging techniques use my bones to indicate how long ago a lived, but my bones themself provide a guess to how old I was at my death. Developmentally, I was a full adult at the time of my death. My wisdom teeth had fully erupted and were slightly worn down. This is important because scientists know that modern human females are fully developed and have wisdom teeth by the time they are 18. They also know that modern chimpanzees develop wisdom teeth between the ages of 11 and 13. When comparing my features to other fossils, it was concluded that I developed faster than modern humans, but slower than chimpanzees. Based on this information, I was between 12 and 18 years old at the time of my death.
I have now mentioned my decline, or my death, multiple times, so let's not beet around the bush. I am sure you're all curious. There is no exact cause of death, but there are a few clues. We can most likely rule out death by a predator, as there are no postmortem carnivore and scavenger marks. Normally when animals are killed by predators their bones will be chewed or crushed due to the predator gnawing on the bones. My bones show a puncture wound from a carnivore tooth at the top of my left pubic bone. It was a perimortem injury, meaning it happened at or around the time of my death. If the bone was still fresh when I sustained this injury, it is possible that it was unrelated to my death. Newer evidence may suggest that I fell out of a tree. In addition to the puncture wound, my bones were full of cracks. A CT scan showed that these fractures were consistent with those of that happen when a body falls from a great height. The research shows I may have stuck out my arms to brace myself, as my injuries are greenstick fractures and spiral fractures. These occur when an arm bends and cracks or twists as it breaks. These cracks were originally thought to be due to spending millions of years in the ground, but new information continues to surface.
While my decline still remains somewhat of a mystery, my name and my fame will never be forgotten.