Beauty's fatal failing: a lesson from Lucy

Good looks are indeed a fleeting, if not necessarily sure-footed, thing. For this timely reminder we can thank Lucy (not her real name), whose untimely death 3.18 million years ago has been keeping scientists in the United States awake at night, and they published insightful findings a few days ago.

Lucy, you see, fell from a tree, apparently "about 12 meters tall" (the airy imprecision immediately casts suspicions on the worthiness of the research) in what we now call Ethiopia. Well, if you will go clambering around 12-meter tall trees in the middle of the night without a flashlight, don't come to me looking for sympathy.

But dear old Professor John Kappelman, who specializes in anthropology and geology - but not in measuring trees - at the University of Texas, brims not just with intelligence but down-to-earth decency as well.