With a cranial capacity of four hundred cc, a third of yours, she’d neither bore you with incessant chatter nor go in for morbid introspection. But she walked upright on two legs, all three foot six inches of her. And when, three point two million years on, her near complete remains were found at a desiccated lake bed east of the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, she sent shockwaves through a paleontological community forced now to quadruple its estimate of how long hominids (next door to the apes on Primate Alley) have walked the earth. Over the next two decades the figure would be further revised upwards. So high is the ratio of …
… illustrated essay here
… portraits here