>> I think basically it's
a human characteristic
that we are curious.
And when you look
anthropologically
around the world, you can
pretty much name the culture.
And they'll have
a creation story.
We know our own from the
Judea Christian tradition.
Those of us from Northern
Europe and that tradition.
There are others in South Asia.
There are others in
Aboriginal, Australia.
There are others right
here in California.
And there's only one way to
figure out what really happened.
So if you treat it more like
a forensic science and ask,
let's figure out
what happened here.
Let's not wave our arms.
Let's not imagine.
Let's not speculate.
Let's not do science fiction.
Let's do science.
Well in 1990, we had worked
on the east side of the river.
We had found the Lucy species,
equivalent to the bottom
of the Hadar formation.
And we'd seen sediments
a little deeper in time.
Unfortunately, they
were all lake beds.
And you don't find early
hominids or other primates
in the middle of a lake.
So we had to get to the edge.
And by doing that on the west
side of the river, we were able
to push deeper into time.
And we found one band at
about 5.2 million years.
Very rich invertebrate fossils.
But we were really frustrated.
Because we couldn't find
any hominids at all.
We had horses, pigs,
hippos, rhinos, elephant,
all kinds of fauna,
gigantic tortoises,
but we couldn't get
any hominids.
And we couldn't figure out why.
And right at the end of the
field season we finally said,
you know, we're not
just getting hominids.
Let's move up the
stratigraphy a notch.
And we found a horizon
at 4.4 million years ago
that just hit the right
ecological circumstances
that had hominids living,
dying and now their bones
after being suspended there
for 4.4 million years eroding
out on to the surface.
So we were able to put a team on
those rocks and begin to exploit
that 4.4 million
year old horizon.
So we went.
We put teams in the field.
We found more bits and pieces.
We found a base of
a hominid cranium.
We found associated dentitions.
We found a partial arm.
And we thought, this is great.
We went back in the 94 season
to see if we could find the rest
of that individual
whose arm we had found.
And it turned out
that we couldn't.
But nearby we found a
different individual's skeleton.
And when we first found
it, it didn't look
like a skeleton at all.
A graduate student at
the time, [foreign name],
young Ethiopian scholar,
highly trained osteologist,
found two little
pieces from the palm
of the hand, just
this bone here.
And these little pieces
he picked up and said,
this looks like a hominid.
So we did what we always do.
We scooped up all the loose
already eroded sediment.
We run it through a
very fine grid, a sieve,
and then we picked
other pieces out.
And as we picked other pieces
out, we would find micro mammals
and bovids and monkeys.
But there were hominid
hand and foot bones.
And as we scraped and brushed
that surface, we found some
of these bones in place.
And so for the rest of
that 1994 field season,
we focused on that little hill.
And we were rewarded with a
very dense scatter of pieces
from a single female
individual's skeleton.
Affording us a really
unprecedented look
into the hands and the feet and
the pelvis, the arms, the jaws,
the teeth, the skull
of that individual
who had died 4.4
million years ago.
Arte is a young adult female.
We know that from
the bone fusion.
We know it from the
eruption of her dentition.
She died fairly young.
We don't know why.
But we now have hand proportion.
Foot proportion.
Limb proportion.
And we learned a lot of
things about the biology
of this creature from
this assemblage of more
than 120 pieces of bone all
from that one excavation.
And so we're able now to realize
that this is a creature unlike
anything that we've seen before.
In living primates or
even the fossil record.
This is a creature for example,
that retained the ability
to grasp with the big toe.
That is something
that humans don't do
and Australopithecus didn't do.
But Arte did.
Then we could ask questions
about the rest of the body.
What were her limb
proportions like?
How did her wrist function?
And we learned from that and
from the bones of the hand
that it didn't function like
a chimpanzee's functions.
It's not a knuckle
walker's hand.
It's the hand of something else.
It's not human.
But neither is it chimpanzee.
And so by going through
each part of her anatomy,
we're able to understand
better the adaptations
that characterized the earliest
known members of a lineage
that ultimately would
become human.
She's by no means a human.
Now what about the
world she lived in?
Well we can't learn that
directly from her skeleton.
But when we look at the pelvis
we see adaptations to climbing
that are absent in
the Lucy species.
So this is a very, very early
biped still well adapted
to our boreal existence
beginning to work
on terrestrial resources.
But not in the kinds of
ecological settings seen
in the Lucy species or
later hominid species.
What we found from those tens of
thousands of associated fossils,
plants, animals,
birds, all of the rest,
was that she occupied
a woodland setting.
Not an open grassland Savannah.
And this also constitutes
a kind of a breakthrough
in the understanding of
the earliest hominids.
And it comes back and it answers
that question, that mystery,
of why we couldn't
find any hominids
down low in the stratigraphy.
It turns out that
hominids are very,
very habitat restricted
early on in time.
It's only later as Lucy and
then her decedents arise
that the ecological niche of
hominids broaden to the extent
that we can expect
to find their remains
in lots of different places.
If you go early in
time, hominids are rare
because they're ecologically
restricted.
