Glutter

From Independent Online..

"For scientists like Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University in the US, Selam is "a veritable mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history". The chief surprise is that her shoulder blades and arms still look like those of a gorilla. There is now hot debate over whether they are just useless evolutionary baggage or a sign that 3.3 million years ago Selam and her family were still swinging.

If they were, then the most popular theory of why humans stood up is challenged, says Desmond Morris, the zoologist who studies human behaviour. This theory says they did it because they had learned to use their hands for making tools and weapons but still needed to get around. "If Selam is significant and not an oddity, that means bipedalism came first. So there must have been a different reason for it."

But he warns against drawing too many conclusions. "People end up basing their idea of an entire species on a little girl's skeleton. There's a man in the Guinness World Records who is eight feet tall. If you found him, and only him, in three million years' time what would you think we had been?"....

"This is a stunning discovery," said Martin Meredith, author of The State of Africa, "but it does not change the picture of human evolution. What we're doing now is filling in the pieces." For him and many other observers, one of the most significant things about Selam is the identity of the man who discovered her. Desmond Morris agrees. "It is wonderful news," he said. "There is still a colonial and imperial flavour to anthropology - virtually all the discoveries are made by Europeans and Americans who go out to these remote places with the help of the locals, who also do the digging. So the fact that Selam was discovered by an African leading a team in his own backyard is brilliant."

Human Evolution: An exclusive interview with the man who discovered the oldest child in the world"

(This month's National Geographic was good as well. The article was a bit short, but it had some interesting facts that I hadn't read anywhere else.)