ancestor

Revolutionary fossil evidence from Ethiopia is challenging decades of scientific consensus about human origins. New discoveries suggest that the famous Lucy fossil, long considered a direct ancestor of modern humans, may instead represent just one branch of a much more complex evolutionary tree. The findings, published in the journal Nature, link previously mysterious fossils to a distinct hominin species that lived alongside Lucy's kind 3.4 million years ago. For half a century, Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which Lucy belongs, has occupied a privileged position in the story of human evolution. Discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia's Afar Triangle, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton was hailed as the most complete early human ancestor ever found and seemed to offer a clear link between