Modern humans have much longer muscle proportions. Lucy’s leg muscles didn’t look like ours. “Our muscle reconstruction confirms that Lucy could do that, too.” It’s not just that we have this mode of mobility in common with our ancestors understanding this anatomy helps us conceptualize how she walked and ran and how we became upstanding citizens ourselves. “If you were to stand up right now, your legs would be entirely straight,” Wiseman tells Inverse. Wiseman’s first pass at this imaging took three or four months, but then she spent a year tweaking her model. This rendering comes courtesy of Ashleigh Wiseman, a paleoanthropology research associate at the University of Cambridge. An upstanding citizenĪ digital reconstruction of Lucy’s leg muscles - 36 in each limb - further solidifies that this icon walked erect while representing a scientific first. This research, published on June 13 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, drew from a novel, painstaking computer simulation to render a digital reconstruction of Lucy’s legs and musculature. Now we have more solid evidence than ever that Lucy walked on outstretched legs straightened beneath her - and probably ran, too. But did Lucy walk fully erect like we do or on bent knees like a chimp or bonobo? Lucy’s remains, which are all skeletal, only tell us so much, such as her approximate height (three and a half feet) and weight (60 to 65 pounds). In a sense, bipedalism was one of humanity’s first steps (literally) toward becoming ourselves.īut exactly how she walked upright is still largely unknown. We already know, through plentiful evidence, that she, as well as her contemporaries, were walking upright on two feet even before the introduction of stone tools or enlarged human brains. This female hominid species Australopithecus afarensis died sometime in her early twenties but is about 3.18 million years old. Also known as AL 288-1 and Dinkinesh, our shared ancestor (or rather, 40 percent of her skeleton) was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. There’s some news about everyone’s favorite great-great-great-great-great-(etc.) aunt, Lucy.
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