A 3.3 million-year-old skeleton of the earliest child ever found shows the ancient ancestor of modern humans walked upright but may have also climbed trees. The remains of the three-year-old girl, found in Ethiopia's Dikika region, is of the same species as the famous hominid fossil skeleton known as "Lucy". "It represents the earliest and most complete partial skeleton of a child ever found in the history of paeleoanthropology," said Dr Zeresenay Alemseged, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Dating of the sediment in which the bones were found suggests the child lived between 3.31 and 3.35 million years ago. The discovery sheds light on a branch of the human tree known as Australopithecus afarensis.
Lucy, recovered in Ethiopia in 1974, is the most famous A. afarensis fossil. For more than 20 years Lucy was the earliest known member of the hominid family. Hominids are primates who split from apes between five and seven million years ago. The skull, torso and limbs show both human and ape-like features.