You’ve probably heard about Lucy. She’s a 3.2-million-year-old relative of ours, a bipedal ape who only stood three feet tall. She’s famous for the discovery of her partial skeleton in 1974, a discovery that enabled scientists to learn a lot about her life, and about her species, Australopithecus afarensis. Now a team of scientists has put forward evidence about how she died: by a long fall from a tree. If they’re right, her death might actually tell us a lot about her life, too–and about how we evolved to walk upright. But hold on–as I wrote in the New York Times on Monday–a number of other experts don’t think the scientists have made a compelling case. Regardless of how she died, however, this research has led to something pretty exciting: you can download the 3-D scans of some of Lucy’s bones and print out replicas.
I paid a visit to the good folks at This Week In Science on Wednesday to talk about getting my genome sequenced.You can watch here, although between my fuzzy camera and fuzzier beard, you may just want to listen.
Just a reminder that I’m heading to Lincoln, Nebraska, next week to give a public lecture about our 500-year quest to map the brain. Details here.
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details here.
September 15: Washington DC. “The Emergence of Life: On the Earth, in the Lab, and Elsewhere.” Panel discussion at a daylong public conference at the Library of Congress.
September 18: Brooklyn Book Festival. I’ll be joining Ed Yong and others. Details here.
October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details to come.
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published September 2, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.