She was perhaps three years old, a tiny little girl often carried in her mother's arms. She lived some three million years ago in the woodlands of what is now Ethiopia, an early human of the same species as the famous Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis. Her short life was most ordinary, but Dikika baby—named for the region where her bones were discovered in December 2000—goes into the annals of anthropology as the most complete ancient infant ever found. And what a baby she is! Her fossilized skull—complete with a face—contains a full set of milk teeth and unerupted adult teeth. Most extraordinary, her skeleton revealed a rare hyoid bone, crucial for human speech. Working from her skeletal head, forensic artists Kennis & Kennis give us an idea of what she may have looked like, a face filled with a child's wonder.
