How can we know Lucy was a woman?
Johanson hypothesized nearly immediately that Lucy is a lady because of their unique small size. He was familiar with traditional hominin breakthroughs from almost every other experts, in other parts of Africa, for the age ahead of the Lucy finding. The guy knew you to, like other life primates, hominins had a tendency to end up being sexually dimorphic, definition new guys was bigger than the fresh women; ergo, it seemed obvious the apparently brief bones recovered from An effective.L. 288 was the ones from a lady (select Scott & Stroik, 2006, having a discussion of one’s option type sexual dimorphism inside Lucy’s species).
After, scientists projected Lucy’s height in line with the period of their own femur, as the avoid regarding her femur is crushed previous to-do fossilization. They made use of statistical formulas you to relate femur size so you can stature to predict one Lucy endured up to 104 so you can 106 centimeters (cm) tall (Feldesman & Lundy, 1988; Jungers, 1988; McHenry, 1991). Men off Lucy’s kinds were probably nearer to 150 cm high (McHenry, 1991). In the 2008, a team of experts virtually remodeled Lucy’s broken femur using 3d computer-depending technical and discovered that it was most likely just a few millimeters less than simply was once think (Sylvester, Merkl, et al., 2008). …