How did Lucy, the famous female of prehistoric times, die?

Scientists at the University of Texas think they know how Lucy, the famous female of prehistoric times, met her death, writes Richard Collins. 

Writing in the current edition of Nature, they claim that she fell from a tree and died from her injuries. If that’s right, they will have helped answer an intriguing question; when did our ancestors come down from the trees?

On the morning of November 24, 1974, Donald Johanson, the leader of a Franco-American research team, came upon scattered human-like bones in a gully close to the Awash River in Ethiopia. It took three weeks to gather up all of the fragments.