Lucy and the Australopithecines: Do the Remains Represent a Single Individual?

Southern apes Australopithecus are an extinct group of great apes that lived in Africa over 4 million to 1 million years ago, one of the most famous fossils of southern apes known to date, the Lucy fossil, because it is one of the most complete fossils of all homo-humans. There is some reason to doubt that Lucy represents one individual or belongs to one sample. In a video at the gallery, fossil discoverer Donald Johansson admits that he found fossil bones scattered on the foot of a hill, and foreign bones at the site. The bones were spread out at the foot of the hill and were not bound together as a single structure, says Anne Gibbon: "Johanson's team has spread along the rocky stream to collect Lucy's bones."67 Johansson explains that if there had been another rainstorm, Lucy's bones could never have been found. This does not generate confidence in the skeletal unit; if another storm had wiped out the bones, what did the previous rainstorms do? The traditional response is that there is no repeat bone from Lucy's bones, which suggests that it is for one individual. This is certainly possible if the sample is complete. However, because the sample is acutely deficient, this answer does not make sense. It is difficult to say with high confidence that the key parts of the skeleton, such as the pelvis and the half of the thigh, belong to one person. However, these two bones are the most studied and important. Lucy has a small skull similar to that of a chimpanzee, and Lee Berger, a human paleontologist at the University of Witwatersrand, notes that: "Lucy's face is as swollen as a contemporary chimpanzee's."68 On the other hand, there is strong opposition to the idea that Lucy is a morphological hybrid of humans and apes, where Bernard Wood rejects this misunderstanding, saying: "Some mistakenly understand that southern apes have a mixture of the characteristics of modern humans and apes, or think worse that they are a failed group of humans, not Southern apes either."69 - Casey for a knife. — Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page https://www.facebook.com/braheen.org/posts/pfbid0WBVLPu4U4tkJCM9Syxr1RJKj9FfzVikNJfgTr2Bq2e63iahKsKPyAa2V4ELqThTel