Prehistoric Autopsy Report

Researchers only had 40% of Lucy’s skeleton so they used comparison and inferring as a technique to reconstruct Lucy. While putting together Lucy’s skeleton, researchers found out that she was very small and an adult. They decided to use a modern human skeleton to infer some of the missing pieces. The team filled in some of the missing parts using other fossils and making a physical model of the skeleton which they would use as a basis of the reconstruction (Prehistoric Autopsy video). Professor Robin Crompton used a series of footprint trails from the Laetoli area to find more information about bipedalism of afarensis. He then compared those footprints to human footprints and found out that Lucy walked upright. They also used animations to demonstrate how Lucy would of have had walked. There would be a slight swing of the hips because the hip itself is broader (Prehistoric Autopsy video).
In the animation, they tried to show that Australopithecus afarensis would had walked halfway between a chimpanzee and a modern human (Prehistoric Autopsy video). Looking at her knees and pelvis demonstrated …show more content…
The birth canal is also different in humans and chimpanzees. Human’s birth canal is wide at the top and then long at the mid-plane in the middle (Prehistoric Autopsy video). It is also round at the outlet. In the other hand, chimpanzees’ birth canals are long in all dimensions. The modifications in our pelvis for locomotion have affected childbirth. Lucy’s pelvis is small but it looks more like a modern human pelvis than it does like a chimpanzee (Prehistoric Autopsy video). Lucy’s birth canal is different than the birth canal from a modern human because she didn’t have to give birth to a large-brained baby. Walking upright on two legs caused Lucy’s childbirth to be more difficult. The baby probably couldn’t twist and turn during childbirth, while human babies can actually do this (Prehistoric Autopsy