For some time she was the oldest known member of the human family. Fifty years after Lucy’s discovery in Ethiopia, the remarkable remains continue to generate theories and questions.
In a non-descript room in the National Museum of Ethiopia, 3.18 million-year-old bones have been delicately removed from a safe and laid out on a long table.
These include fossilized dental remains, skull fragments, parts of the pelvis and femur that make up the world’s most famous Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy.
The hominid was discovered on November 24, 1974, in the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia by a team of scientists led by Maurice Tayeb, Yves Coppens, Donald Johanson, John Kalb, and Raymonde Bonnefille.
The 52 bone fragments, which made up about 40 percent of Lucy’s skeleton, were the most complete fragments ever found at the time, and they revolutionized the understanding of our ancestors.
The skeleton was initially called AL-288-1 in reference to Afar and its geographical location.
But researchers named it Lucy after The Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, which they heard after celebrating their discovery.
Lucy walked on two legs and is believed to have died between the ages of 11 and 13 – which is considered adult for this species. He was 1.10 m (3.6 ft) tall and weighed 29 kg (64 lb).
For Sahlselassie Melaku, 31, head of the paleontology department, Lucy’s discovery represents an emergence from the “Dark Ages” in our understanding of human ancestors.
“The impact of the discovery was huge for the discipline and even the whole world,” he told AFP.
Lucy showed that members of the human family existed three million years ago, and also provided a template for fitting together subsequent bone discoveries.
The amount of information that can be obtained from the bones has allowed for some highly detailed theories about Lucy’s life.
The slightly deformed vertebrae, for example, “means he probably had back problems”, Melaku said.
‘Extraordinary’
Jean-Renaud Boisserie, a paleontologist specializing in Ethiopia and research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said it was an “extraordinary” success for the discipline.
“We knew very little about the period basically three million years ago, and we had absolutely nothing,” he said.
Lucy was often described as “humanity’s grandmother,” but recent discoveries suggest she may have been more like an aunt or cousin, experts say.
Skeletons found in places such as Ethiopia, South Africa and Kenya have complicated the picture and there is much debate over when different species of hominid emerged and which should be classified as part of the human or chimpanzee families.
The discovery of “Toumai” in Chad in 2001 – a skull six or seven million years old – suggested that the human family may go further back than previously thought.
Meanwhile, Lucy hasn’t revealed all her secrets yet.
A study published in 2016 argued that it spent one third of its time in trees, where it built nests, and that its upper limbs were highly developed.
Another study that year in the American journal Plos One theorized that he died after falling from a tree.
A 2022 study in Nature focused on Lucy’s pelvis concluded that the brains of newborn members of Australopithecus were very immature, like those of human newborns today, and required parental support to survive.
“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Melaku said, smiling. “In particular, we don’t know much about the early livelihoods of these early human ancestors.”
The museum receives frequent requests to study it, but the iconic skeleton no longer leaves Ethiopia.
Extensive scientific advances and advanced equipment are opening new avenues for research.
“The studies that can be done on him, on his companions, raise scientific questions for the future,” Boisserie said.
“Such extraordinary materials play a stimulating role in the development of research.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
