BEJING — The remains of a 3-year-old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago were unearthed in Ethiopia Wednesday. This is the earliest known child discovered so far and could fill a critical missing link in evolution. The girl has been named ‘Selam,’ which means peace in Ethiopia’s languages. She belongs to the ‘Australopithecus afarensis’ species and blurs the line between apes and humans. She has also been nicknamed ‘little Lucy,’ after the famous adult female ‘Lucy’ of the same species discovered just 4 kms away in 1974, a landmark in the search for the origins of humanity. The fossil, including an entire skull, torso, shoulder blade and various limbs, was discovered at Dikaka, some 400 kms northeast of the capital Addis Ababa near the Awash River in the Rift Valley. ‘The finding is the most complete hominid skeleton ever found in the world,’ Zeresenay Alemseged, head of the Paleoanthropological Research Team, told a news conference. The fossil reveals a critical moment in human evolution that saw our earliest relatives shaking off the legacy of ape ancestors to take their first tentative steps along a path that ultimately led to modern humans. The skeleton’s […]