3.3 million year old girl?

I just read this article about the skull of a three year old girl unearthed in Ethiopia. The skull is claimed to be 3.3 million years old, but I can't find anything about whether the girl was human, homo sapiens, or a species that man evolved from. The famous skeletal remains of 3.2 million-year-old 'Lucy' showed that she wasn't homo sapiens. So, can anyone shed some light on this? What was this girl?

3.3 million year old girl

I've heard her mentioned in a couple of UK documentaries - Prof. Iain Stewart' has certainly mentioned her - I've seen her used on evolution charts but never investigated her further. Here she is anyway.

Here is a link to National Geographic:
NatGeo

this article says the child was Australopithecus afarensis.

reply to post by jiggerj


that is an early ancestor.... not sapiens... based on the picture of the skull.

--skull freak--

reply to post by solve

Same species as 'Lucy'. Some were calling her Lucy's daughter, even though she is much older than Lucy.

Originally posted by jiggerj
What was this girl?

1 of EA*RTHs many CO-terrains perhaps jiggerj interesting find...

NAMASTE*******

I remember seeing somewhere that we as humans have only been on earth for a couple few hundred thousand years. 3.3 million is a huge difference to me science needs to come clean on some things

reply to post by ed1320


ah the sweet illusion of time.
there really is no telling...
soon another way to determine time will come, and trash the ones we have now, like before.
did you know that they have found soft tissue inside a t-rex fossil-----whaaat?
does not compute...

There's all kinds of anomalies. Fact is we really don't know anything about human history, or even this reality. Fossils are pretty hard to come by as is, and from the few we have we're meant to believe we have the "truth"
I think humans have been around a lot longer than we think.

Originally posted by butcherguy
Here is a link to National Geographic:
NatGeo

this article says the child was Australopithecus afarensis.

That's it. Thank you.

Originally posted by ed1320
I remember seeing somewhere that we as humans have only been on earth for a couple few hundred thousand years. 3.3 million is a huge difference to me science needs to come clean on some things

That's what was bothering me. Every time I read 'girl' in the article I assumed it was talking about a human girl. And, like you said, we've only been around for a couple hundred thousand years.

reply to post by KBadger

Fossils are pretty hard to come by as is

Don't you find that odd? Billions of species over billions of years and 99% of them extinct. Just seems like those regions where remains are found today, well, they should be a whole junkyard of dead things - wouldn't ya think?

Originally posted by solve
reply to post by ed1320

 

ah the sweet illusion of time.
there really is no telling...
soon another way to determine time will come, and trash the ones we have now, like before.
did you know that they have found soft tissue inside a t-rex fossil-----whaaat?
does not compute...

edit on 31-5-2013 by solve because: (no reason given)

When I first read about Lucy in the 70´s she was "guesstimated" at 50,000 yrs old. Now she is at 3.2 million... what next??

I think its fair to say that the title of the article is misleading to a degree. To be classified as human, i.e. like us, one must be a member of the very same species as the rest of us. Of course, this example is not, as alluded to by some of the posters in this thread.

Comments like " science needs to come clean on some things" in relation to this specific article are utterly unfounded, and based in bad information, or worse, poor understanding of good information. It is actually very simple. Mankind as it is today has only existed for a few hundred thousand years, as far as discoveries to this date can indicate. There are however, plenty of proto-human species, between what we are now, and the scat flinging, tree dwellers we used to be.

If however, a body is discovered which is a million or more years old, yet bares all the familiar hallmarks of our species, as it is today, THEN science will have probing questions to answer about its conduct. Till then, learn to think before speaking.

Originally posted by ed1320
I remember seeing somewhere that we as humans have only been on earth for a couple few hundred thousand years. 3.3 million is a huge difference to me science needs to come clean on some things

Australopithecus afarensis is over 3 million years old, but it's not homo sapiens.

Science certainly doesn't have all the answers about man's evolution but it looks like you need to pay more attention to what science does know.

Originally posted by jiggerj

Don't you find that odd? Billions of species over billions of years and 99% of them extinct. Just seems like those regions where remains are found today, well, they should be a whole junkyard of dead things - wouldn't ya think?

It's actually exactly as you would expect given the number of dead things with hard skeletons, who were in the (rare) environmental circumstances for them to be fossilised (remember we rarely find organic remains- fossils are just mineralised remnants.)
Given that the current landmass we occupy is only 19% of the planet I shudder with fear at what we'd find in the oceans if we could excavate without detroying.


I think current estiamtes are that we've only ever found evidence of less than 1% of the species that ever lived...that is mind shattering.

Anything 3 million years old certainly wasn't human, and that includes Lucy.

Sorry.

Chimpanzees have been known in the wild to eat the children of chimps from other tribes. Humans have been known to kill the children of there enemies(as in chimps from other tribes) so, what did Lucy do?

Originally posted by Hopechest
Anything 3 million years old certainly wasn't human, and that includes Lucy.

Sorry.

You don't know that for certain.

Originally posted by Ear-Responsible

Originally posted by Hopechest
Anything 3 million years old certainly wasn't human, and that includes Lucy.

Sorry.

You don't know that for certain.

True.

If in 3 million years time they dig up some fossils from 2013 and the fossils are randomly:
An African Pygmy, An NBA player and an Inuit- someone will invariably say that in 2013 modern Humans co-existed with other species.

The thought that all humans were or will ever be (without genetic tinketring) physically all the same is absurd.

Someone was using fire to cook meat 2.2 million years ago..statistically, given the rarity of hominid fossils we probably havent seen that exact variation of "us" yet.

For all we know there may have been a long lived but socially isolated sea/coast based culture of what we now term "antomically modern man" that goes back 3 million years but we will NEVER statisitcally find evidence of their existence.