PARIS, Sept 20: Palaeontologists, reporting an extraordinarily rare fossil find, say they have uncovered a nearly complete skeleton of a hominid child who lived at a key stage in primate evolution 3.3 million years ago.

The fossilised remains of the child, estimated to have died at the age of three and who was probably a female, shed light on a hotly disputed branch of the human tree known as Australopithecus afarensis.

The best-known A. afarensis is the famous fossil Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and who, for more than 20 years, was the earliest known member of the hominid family.

The new fossil was found in Dikika, in Ethiopia’s Awash Valley, on the opposite bank to where Lucy and other A. afarensis remains were found, the experts report in the latest issue of Nature, the weekly British science journal.

Hominids are primates who split from apes between five and seven million years ago.

They are considered the forerunners of anatomically modern humans, who appeared on the scene about 200,0000 years ago.

Still unclear, though, is the exact line of geneaology from these small, rather ape-like creatures to the rise of the powerfully-brained H. sapiens.

Once thought by some to be our ancestor, A. afarensis is now widely considered to be a failed branch of the human tree, for many experts suspect the hominid was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.

Its brain, adjusted to its body size, was not much larger than that of a chimpanzee and although it no longer had the large canines that distinguished apes from hominids, it had relatively large chewing teeth that were still primitive.

“The remarkably complete... skeleton is a veritable mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history,” exulted Bernard Wood, an anthropologist at George Washington University.—AFP