New York – 3.3 million years ago, a three year old girl died in present day Ethiopia, in an area called Dikika. Though a baby, she is providing us with unique accounts of our past as a grand mother would! Her completeness, antiquity, and age at death combined make this find unprecedented in the history of paleoanthropology and open many new research avenues to investigate into the infancy of early human ancestors.

“Lucy’s Baby” is discovered by Paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged. Born in Axum, Ethiopia, he is based at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Through his Dikika Research Project (DRP) in the Afar desert of Ethiopia, he found Selam, the earliest known skeleton of a hominid child of the species Australopithecus afarensis. She is a member of the same species as Lucy, discovered nearby in 1974.

Alemseged’s research program focuses on the discovery and interpretation of hominid fossil remains and their environments with emphsise on fieldwork designed to acquire new data on early hominid skeletal biology, environmental context, and behavior.

In the following video from Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED.COM), he talks about what he has found and how Africa holds the clues to what makes us human.

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