Lucy's Discoverer Receives Honors From Ethiopian University

On November 24, 1974, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and his doctoral student Tom Gray made a groundbreaking discovery in Hadar, Ethiopia: the fossilized skeleton of a 3.2-million-year-old early human ancestor, whom they named "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis). Johanson discovered a tiny fragment of an arm bone (an ulna) that clearly belonged to a hominid and not to a monkey or antelope. Looking up the hillside, they found more bones that had been washed out of the sediment. That evening, the camp celebrated with a cassette of Beatles songs. When "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" came on, someone suggested naming the fossil "Lucy"—a name that immediately caught on. They recovered about 40% of her skeleton, a rarity for fossils of this age. This included parts of her skull, pelvis, ribs, and limbs. Lucy was small (about 1.07 meters tall) and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. Crucially, her pelvis and knee proved that she walked upright like us, while her other features indicated that she was still climbing trees. Lucy's state of preservation and age provided strong evidence for bipedalism in early hominins and significantly altered the picture of human evolution. Johanson later classified Lucy as a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, of which she remains the most famous specimen. She fundamentally proved that bipedalism evolved before the development of large brains, thus changing our understanding of the human family tree.