AL 333

Discovered in 1975 by Donald Johanson's team in Hadar, Ethiopia, the "First Family" is estimated to be about 3.2 million years old, and consists of the remains of at least thirteen individuals of different ages.

In the late 1960s, the French paleoanthropologist Maurice Taieb started geological exploration of the relatively unexplored area of Ethiopia known as the Afar Triangle, located in the north of the country.

The sediment was also fossil-rich and often preserved partial skeletons of animals, implying that the researchers could potentially recover well-preserved and more complete fossils from the environment.

The recovery of these 216 hominid specimens is unique in African paleoanthropology, since the close proximity of the different fossils suggests that these were individuals who might have lived in a group or been part of the same family.

The morphology of this bone suggests that A. afarensis had transverse and longitudinal foot arches and therefore also had a very human-like bipedal gait.

[3] The discovery of all of the fossils at AL 333 aligned close together in one geological stratum is an obvious sign that they died at about the same time.

[4] The unique grouping of such a large number of individuals in the same place and at virtually the same time has led to much speculation over the cause of death.

One popular theory was a flash flood, but more detailed study of the geological formation of the site has largely discredited this idea.

However, some paleoanthropologists disagree with this, believing that although the size of the bones vary at AL 333, the variation is due to age and not the sex of the individuals.

In order to give more insight about the sexual dimorphism of A. afarensis, the fossil bones from AL 333 were compared to other sites that contained remains of females.

These tests show a level of sexual dimorphism comparable to gorillas, meaning that males were significantly larger than females.