Scientists have been studying species that lived before humans and the discovery of a rare fossil in Ethiopia in 1974 provided a deeper look into the living beings that existed millions of years ago.
The discovery of a rare fossil was named Lucy whose 40% of the skeleton shows it was a female Australopithecus afarensis, and now scientists are examining how this human ancestor moved 3.2 million years ago.
The findings of the study were published in the Royal Society Open Science journal which estimate that Lucy was shorter than the average human, reaching about 3.3 feet, had an ape-like face and a brain about one-third the size of a human brain.
Lead study author Dr Ashleigh LA Wiseman, a research associate at the University of Cambridge in the UK, said: "The defining aspect of what makes us human is the ability to walk on two legs, but understanding how and why this evolved has been debated for a long time."
“With recent advances in computational modelling, it is now possible to investigate these questions. Of course, in the fossil record, we are left looking at the bare bones. But muscles animate the body — they allow you to walk, run, jump and even dance. So, if we want to understand how our ancestors moved, we first need to reconstruct their soft tissues."
"Lucy lived 3.2 million years ago on the African savannah. She would need to have walked over uneven ground and explored a mixture of forested environments and open grassland," Wiseman said.
“Larger muscle mass typically means greater muscle force, and it is very unsurprising to find that the reconstructions of Lucy’s muscles demonstrate that she had greater muscle mass than a human, enabling her to move freely between these different environments."
"Lucy likely walked and moved in a way that we do not see in any living species today," Wiseman said.
"If Lucy was a biped just like we are and walked exclusively on two legs, then she should be able to move in similar ways as we can," Wiseman said.