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See Lucy Run, 3.2 Million Years Ago [nytimes.com]:

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More than three million years after her death, the early human ancestor known as Lucy is still divulging her secrets.

In 2016, an autopsy indicated that the female Australopithecus afarensis, whose partial remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974 and is considered the most complete hominin fossil found to date, died from a fall out of a tree. Seven years later, a virtual reconstruction of her leg and pelvic muscles — which are not preserved in fossils — revealed that she stood about three and a half feet tall, weighed between 29 and 93 pounds, and was capable of standing and walking upright, similar to modern humans.

A new study published in the journal Current Biology [cell.com] proposes that Lucy was capable of running, too. But she would not have been much of a marathoner and might have struggled to keep up with a contemporary couch potato in a 100-yard dash. “She was not a natural runner,” said Karl Bates, an evolutionary biomechanics researcher at the University of Liverpool and lead author of the paper. “In all probability, she could run only through short bursts of energy rather than long-distance chases.”

The fossil, which dates to 3.2 million years ago and represents 40 percent of Lucy’s skeleton, is often described as having a mix of human and ape features. “Her overall body size was much smaller than ours and her upper body larger, with longer arms and shorter legs,” Dr. Bates said. “Even after correction for differences in body size, she would have been much slower than people.” His team’s conclusions bolster the hypothesis that the ability of humans to run long distances is an adaptation that gave them an advantage in acquiring prey.

The analysis was drawn from computer-based movement simulations of Lucy’s leg muscles. The model used the surface area of her bones and the muscular architecture of modern apes to estimate her muscle mass. “The simulator experiments with millions and millions of different sequences until it finds the one that leads to the fastest speed with minimum energy cost,” Dr. Bates said. The researchers compared Lucy’s performances with those of a digital model of a modern human whose measurements echoed those of the 5-foot-9, 154-pound Dr. Bates, who is 38.

VideoSide-by-side comparisons of the optimal maximal speed running gait of Lucy with a modern human-like leg muscle architecture and non-human ape-like leg architecture.CreditCredit...Bates et al. (2025), Current Biology

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