As it turns out, “Lucy”, the famous 3.2-million-year-old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, was ripped 🏋️♀️.
She died as a young adult, judging by her teeth and other evidence, while roaming the grasslands of Africa and climbing through the forest trees. Her bones show little to no evidence of predator bite marks or those of scavengers, and the cause of death remains unknown. Scientists have concluded she was a female because of her small size – femaleAn artist’s depiction of Lucy, the world’s most famous Australopithecus africanus.
Lucy wasn’t very tall, only about 3 feet in height, but Wiseman concluded that her calf and thigh muscles were over twice the size of those of modern humans. Most of the 36 leg muscles recreated by the researcher turned out to be larger and bulkier than our contemporary equivalents.To reconstruct her, Wiseman relied in part on MRI and CT scans of a modern-day woman and man, taking from them “muscle paths” that showed where muscles connected on the body.
Key evidence lay in the knee extensor muscles, which seemed to have the leverage required to straighten the knee. “Lucy’s ability to walk upright can only be known by reconstructing the path and space that a muscle occupies within the body,” Wiseman says. “Lucy’s muscles suggest that she was as proficient at bipedalism as we are, while possibly also being at home in the trees. Lucy likely walked and moved in a way that we do not see in any living species today.”
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