Brazil unveils "Lucy" as earliest known American

  • 21/12/1998

Anthropologists in Rio unveiled the oldest known human fossil from the Americas, a woman's skull with African features that could revolutionise theories on the continent's early inhabitants. The fossil - first discovered in Brazil in 1975 but only recently found to come from a woman who lived 11,500 years ago - shows there were human beings on the continent long before Asian immigration, said anthropologist Ricardo Ventura Santos.