Kadanuumuu ("Big Man" in the Afar language[1]) is the nickname of KSD-VP-1/1, a 3.58-million-year-old partial Australopithecus afarensis fossil discovered in the Afar Region of Ethiopia in 2005 by a team led by Yohannes Haile-Selassie, curator of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Based on skeletal analysis, the fossil is believed to conclusively show that the species was fully bipedal.[2]
At more than 5feet in stature, Kadanuumuu is much taller than the famous Lucy fossil of the same species discovered in the 1970s, and is approximately 400,000 years older.[2] Among other characteristics, Kadanuumuu's scapula (part of the shoulder blade), the oldest discovered to date for a hominid, is comparable to that of modern humans, suggesting that the species was land rather than tree-based.[2] Not all researchers agree with this conclusion.[3]