So welcome back to the family, Baby Selam. She is the world’s oldest infant. She was about three years old when she died 3.3 million years ago. Her descendant, the superstar fossil nicknamed Lucy, an adult female 100,000 years younger, was discovered nearby in 1974. In palaeoanthropology, the female of the species is evidently more durable than the male. Both Baby Selam and Lady Lucy were turned up in the badlands of Ethiopia known as Dikika. Baby Selam (Peace) is the most complete fossil of her species, Australopithecus afarensis, yet found.

To subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, may be a fallacy in duration. But Baby Selam’s bundle of bones, no bigger than a football, is no fallacy but a window on our past. For the first time a skeleton is almost entire. The top half of her body, like a young gorilla’s, and her prehensile fingers suggest that she could climb trees. But her thigh bone, connected to the shin bone connected to the foot, indicates that this little girl-monkey could walk upright even at the age of 3. Was she a foraging biped, who could climb trees when necessary, especially when young and chaste? Her brain and tongue are giving clues to that great divorce, when humans parted company from their cousins, the apes.

Modern techniques are unearthing the forgotten roots of the human race. Are we descended from Hobbits or cannibal Tumais, apes or angels? Baby Selam fills a black hole at the roots of our family tree. The reconstruction of her face from her skull is not that of a girl in bunches. But modern girls are still descended from Baby Selam. For she is the latest answer to the old rhyme: “What are little girls made of?”