A fossil skeleton, Australopithecus afarensis, known by her nickname ‘Lucy’, was discovered by researchers in Ethiopia’s Afar region 50 years ago this month. This ultimately changed scientists’ understanding of human evolution.
Opening a new chapter in human history, the discovery on November 24, 1974, by Don Johanson, an American paleontologist, and Tom Gray, a graduate student, provided evidence that ancient hominins could walk upright on two legs 3.2 million years ago – a trait that was It was thought to have developed recently, CNN reported.
Lucy had a mix of ape-like and human-like traits, suggesting she was on an important branch in the human family tree. Over the past few decades, they have stimulated much research and debate, in addition to igniting widespread public fascination with human origins.
Although researchers have now discovered a fossil hominin twice as old as Lucy, she still remains a major subject for scientific study.
At the time it was found, Lucy had 47 bones and was the oldest known and most complete skeleton of an early human ancestor.
Recalling his 1974 trip to Ethiopia, Don Johanson told CNN that he was walking on 3.2 million-year-old sediments to discover fossilized remains of a variety of animals, “but especially the remains of our ancestors.”
He said, “I started looking over my right shoulder. If I had looked over my left shoulder, I would have missed.”
First, they saw a small piece of bone, a small part of the elbow, as well as a part of the arm.
“He could immediately tell that it was from a human ancestor,” Johansson said, adding that when he and his student Tom Gray knelt down to take a closer look, they found “pieces of skull and fragments of the pelvis and a See “Stomach Pieces”. Bone of the hand and bone of the foot.”
“At that moment I realized it was a childhood dream… I had always wanted to go to Africa to discover something and certainly this was something. But we had no idea that it would become a symbol in the study of human origins, “Johansson said.
At the time of discovery, Lucy’s bones were “very fragile” because they had mineralized and turned to stone. So, the team “crawled very carefully to pick up the clear pieces” before putting them in burlap bags.
Later, he passed them through fine screening into the water stream. The entire process took two and a half weeks.
Johansson recalled that it was amazing to see Lucy come together on the lab table in the field. “The femur there was only about a foot long or 28 centimeters long. What is that? I thought. Is it a baby? OK, let’s look at the jaw. The wisdom teeth were out so she was an adult. But oh my God, If it was an adult, it should have been only about three and a half feet long, a meter tall,” he said.
When asked how it came to be named Lucy, Johansson said that it had delicate bones and was short in stature, so he thought “it was probably a woman.”
He further stated that while Lucy’s species did not directly give rise to modern humans, “her important place on the human family tree gave rise to all subsequent hominin species, most of which became extinct.”
They concluded, “The Homo lineage persisted and eventually gave rise to us, Homo sapiens.”
