Cleveland . . . Meet "Lucy's" great-grandfather. Scientists from The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University, Addis Ababa University and Berkeley Geochronology Center were part of an international team that discovered and analyzed a 3.6 million-year-old partial（局部的） skeleton found in Ethiopia. The early hominid（原始人类） is 400,000 years older than the famous "Lucy" skeleton. Research on this new specimen indicates that advanced human-like, upright（垂直的） walking occurred much earlier than previously thought. The discovery and results from this initial analysis will be published this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The partial skeleton belongs to "Lucy's" species, Australopithecus（南猿） afarensis. It was found in the Woranso-Mille area of Ethiopia's Afar region by a team led by first author Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Curator and Head of physical anthropology（人类学） at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The partial skeleton was excavated over five years after the discovery of a fragment of the lower arm bone in 2005. The excavation（挖掘，发掘） recovered the most complete clavicle（锁骨） and one of the most complete shoulder blades（肩胛骨） ever found in the human fossil record.

The specimen was nicknamed "Kadanuumuu" (kah-dah-nuu-muu) by the authors. "Kadanuumuu" means "big man" in the Afar language and reflects its large size. The male hominid stood between 5 to 5 ½ feet tall, while "Lucy" stood at about 3 ½ feet.

"This individual was fully bipedal（两足动物） and had the ability to walk almost like modern humans," said Haile-Selassie. "As a result of this discovery, we can now confidently say that 'Lucy' and her relatives were almost as proficient（熟练的，精通的） as we are walking on two legs, and that the elongation（伸长，延长） of our legs came earlier in our evolution than previously thought."

Co-author Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy, Kent State University professor of anthropology, explained, "The new specimen tells us much more about the pelvis（骨盆） , thorax（胸腔） , and limb proportions than 'Lucy' was able to alone."