ISRAEL AT WAR - DAY 63

Live UpdateFrom the Liveblog of Monday, August 29, 2016

Ancestor Lucy died in fall from tree 3 million years ago, research suggests

29 August 2016, 6:42 pm 0 Edit

Lucy, an ancient ape-like human relative, met a brutal end when she plummeted from a tree, new analysis of the famous fossil suggests, resolving the three million-year-old mystery of how she died.

Lucy’s upper-arm bones were shattered by the impact of the fall some 3.2 million years ago — a type of trauma also common in car crash victims, researchers from the United States and Ethiopia write in the journal Nature.

Lucy was a member of an early human species that lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago. Her partial skeleton was recovered in 1974.

She was a young adult when she died.

— Agencies