Sep. 21, 2006 Some 3.3 million years ago, a three-year-old girl
died in present day Ethiopia, in an area called Dikika. Though a
baby, she provides researchers with a unique account of our
past, as would a grandmother. 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. The
extraordinary discovery reported this week in the scientific
journal Nature, was found in north-eastern Ethiopia, by a
paleoanthropological research team led by Dr. Zeresenay
Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. The
scientific significance of the new find is multi-fold,
contributing substantially to our comprehension of the
morphology, body plan, behaviour, movement and developmental
patterns of our early ancestors. After full cleaning and
preparation of the fossil it will be possible to reconstruct,
for the first time, much of an entire body of a 3 year-old A