COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — After more than a decade of painstakingly scraping away bits and pieces of sandstone grain by grain with dental tools and picks, a 3.3 million-year-old face, apelike in its features but unmistakably human, has been revealed. The face, is that of a female toddler, brings new life to the study of evolution and understanding of humans and how we stand.

Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist and professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, discovered the "Dikika Baby," also known as "Selam," in the rocky desert of Dikika, Ethiopia in 2000.

Alem...