Lucy's baby' found in Ethiopia BBC

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region.

The female Australopithecus afarensis bones are from the same species as an adult skeleton found in 1974 which was nicknamed "Lucy".

Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature.

They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor.

The juvenile Australopithecus afarensis remains vanishingly rare.

The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones.

"The Dikika fossil is now revealing many secrets about Australopithecus afarensis and other early hominins, because the fossil evidence was not there," said dig leader Zeresenay Alemseged, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Delicate bones

The find consists of the whole skull, the entire torso and important parts of the upper and lower limbs. CT scans reveal unerupted teeth still in the jaw, a detail that makes scientists think the individual may have been about three years old when she died.

Remarkably, some quite delicate bones not normally preserved in the fossilisation process are also present, such as the hyoid, or tongue, bone. The hyoid bone reflects how the voice box is built and perhaps what sounds a species can produce.

Judging by how well it was preserved, the skeleton may have come from a body that was quickly buried by sediment in a flood, the researchers said.

"In my opinion, afarensis is a very good transitional species for what was before four million years ago and what came after three million years," Dr Alemseged told BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh.

"[The species had] a mixture of ape-like and human-like features. This puts afarensis in a special position to play a pivotal role in the story of what we are and where we come from."

Climbing ability

This early ancestor possessed primitive teeth and a small brain but it stood upright and walked on two feet.

There is considerable argument about whether the Dikika girl could also climb trees like an ape.

This climbing ability would require anatomical equipment like long arms, and the "Lucy" species had arms that dangled down to just above the knees. It also had gorilla-like shoulder blades which suggest it could have been skilled at swinging through trees.

But the question is whether such features indicate climbing ability or are just "evolutionary baggage".

The Dikika girl had an estimated brain size of 330 cubic centimetres when she died, which is not very different from that of a similarly aged chimpanzee. However, when compared to the adult afarensis values, it forms 63 - 88% of the adult brain size.

This is lower than that of an adult chimp, where by the age of three, over 90% of the brain is formed. This relatively slow brain growth in the Dikika girl appears to be slightly closer to that of humans.

Slow, gradual development in an extended childhood is regarded as a very human trait - probably to enable our higher functions to develop.

Professor Fred Spoor of University College London said the find would give scientists a "detailed insight into how our distant relatives grew up and behaved... at a time of human evolution when they looked a good deal more like bipedal chimpanzees than like us."

Dr Jonathan Wynn of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues at the University of South Florida dated the sediments surrounding the remains and came up with an age of 3.3 million years.

The "Lucy" skeleton, discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974 belongs to the same species as the Dikika girl. For more than 20 years it was the oldest human ancestor known to science.

I have a few questions about this whole thing!

• How is it they now the age, though the surrounding soil is a good start it is no guarantee!
• How do they know that she is a relative, much less that we are in the same family line.
• This here reveals a difficulty in the science. There is no genetic material so any statement or assumption is a swag/guess. They will never admit this in public but...
• How do they know she is related to "Lucy"? Lucy if I remember right has far less than this.
• The most important question not asked is as there is no scientific foolproof method to prove that this is a relative, than how do we not know it is just another type of monkey/ape that is not related to mankind other than common creator?
• lastly why do the scientist make such blanket statements to the public with little scientific proof? I believe that there are two reasons
  
• Funding steam - There is a fight for funds to live and research on and so one has to be extravagant in claims to get the money(Give me the money and we will put your name in lights)
• There is an above ground agenda to prove evolution, even with bad science. Bad science is making statements that are unproven or not-testable.
  
• These "scientist" have created a whole culture out of nothing, arguing that it indicates how they lived. That is unscientific with no artifacts what so ever.
  
• It is conjecture to prove a point
• It is the foundation of Secular Humanism a blind faith or religion.
  

Blind leading the Blind

Apart from any moral and ethical reasons, can you find some missing cases of logic. They all sound like politicians to me

Making emergency contraception more available has failed to reduce abortion rates, a family planning expert says.

The government said the emergency pill was not targeted at cutting abortions. (So what was it for?)

However, Professor Glasier, who is director of family planning at the Lothian Primary Care NHS Trust, disagreed, saying emergency contraception had been heralded as the solution to rising abortion rates by many experts.

....

About 6% of women use it each year, although the numbers buying it from chemists has almost doubled in the last year.

In the US, authors have claimed that 43% of the reported drop in abortions between 1994 and 2000 was down to emergency contraception, and that around 51,000 pregnancies were prevented by it in 2000/01.

But Professor Glasier, who was an advocate of emergency contraception in the 1990s, said: "Despite the clear increase in the use of emergency contraception, abortion rates have not fallen in the UK."

Contraception

In 1984, 11 women per 1,000 aged 15 to 44 had abortions, compared with 17.8 in 2004.

She said research had shown that women did not always use the contraception at the right moments because they were unaware they had put themselves at risk and as a result it had no impact on pregnancy or abortion rates.

She also questioned whether it was as clinically effective as it was claimed to be.

Professor Glasier added: "If you are looking for an intervention that will reduce abortion rates, emergency contraception may not be the solution, and perhaps you should concentrate most on encouraging people to use contraception before or during sex, not after it."

But Val Buxton, acting chief executive of Brook, a sexual health charity for young people, said: "Easy access to emergency contraception is an essential part of the picture, and abortion rates might be higher if it weren't for the fact that emergency contraception is more easily available than in the past."

Toni Belfield, of the fpa, formerly the Family Planning Association, said: "Emergency contraception is no substitute for correct, regular use of contraception. It is not, and was never intended to be, a panacea for abortion."

And a spokeswoman for the Department of Health said emergency contraception had never been heralded as the answer to rising abortion rates in the UK.

"Our policy has always been that safe sex, using reliable contraception on a regular basis, is the best way for women to protect against unwanted pregnancy."

Now the Question naturally should come to mind on this one question. Why. Has the culture communicated not merely by the morning after pill that one can "play" with no real consequences. Obviously this is true. The problem is there are consequences. Why did they not mention Abstinence as the only proven option? Is it because its there work and there social agenda?

I would say makes one wonder, but it doesn't actually.