“Now it seems that Lucy shared Eastern Africa with another prehuman species, one that may have spent more time in trees than on the ground,” writes John Noble Wilford of the New York Times.

The name Lucy was given to the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton discovered in Eastern Africa and is considered the oldest known ancestor to modern day humans.

“A 3.4-million-year-old fossil foot found in Ethiopia appears to settle the long-disputed question of whether there was only a single line of hominins -- species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees -- between four million and three million years ago,” Wilford continues.

Beverly Z. Saylor of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is a member of the scientific team making the discovery and an author of the report announcing the group’s findings.  She states, “the time this hominin lived, the region had many lakes and streams with wooded shores, thus ample opportunities for arboreal habits.”

Fellow CWRU colleague and author Bruce M. Latimer states, “The findings clearly showed that the adaptation to bipedality, though considered one of the decisive transitions in early human evolution, was not a single, isolated event.”

Read the full New York Times story with Cleveland connections here.