Remember Lucy?

As we’ve said earlier, there are quite a number of definite plot points the researchers have discovered along the way. You might have heard of Lucy – one of the most credited fossil finds of all. Lucy is a partial skeleton found in Ethiopia estimated to be around the age of 3.2 million years. She had a chimpanzee-sized brain and long arms, but experts could somehow tell that she had walked on two legs, unlike a primate.

In discovering Lucy, researchers happened upon a partial skeleton of the Australopithecus, one of our ancestors. In another case of more recent development, however, all the experts had to work with was only a tooth. Given such a sample, it would take them another few years of careful and intricate analysis to yield fruitful results. That’s how meticulous the process of analyzing genetics is.