12 questions · Science
On 24 November 1974 a team led by Donald Johanson dug a skeleton out of the Ethiopian site of Hadar that overturned our picture of prehistory: 47 bones, about 40 percent of one individual, 3.2 million years old. That evening "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was playing in camp and so the find got her name. In Ethiopia she is called Dinkinesh, "you are wonderful". Lucy was an adult woman of about 1.05 metres, perhaps 30 kilograms, and her brain was barely larger than a chimpanzee's. What mattered was her pelvis and the angle of her thigh bone: she walked upright. That settled it: bipedalism came millions of years before the big brain, though researchers had long assumed the reverse. The Laetoli footprints, left by members of her species, confirmed it. At the same time Lucy was no pure ground-dweller: her curved finger bones and powerful arms suggest she still climbed, perhaps to sleep safely in trees at night. Ironically, fractures in her bones hint that she did not survive a fall from a height. Australopithecus afarensis lived roughly 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago in East Africa, and for decades Lucy remained the most famous fossil in the world: until finds such as the Dikika child, a three-year-old girl of the same species, joined her.
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Foto: Andrew from Cleveland, Ohio, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Lucy
Named after the Beatles song playing in the excavation camp. In Ethiopia she is Dinkinesh: "you are wonderful".
About 3.2 million years
Dated via the volcanic ash layers of Hadar. Not the oldest hominin fossil, but long the most complete of its age.
In Ethiopia
In the Afar Triangle near Hadar: one of the most fossil-rich regions on Earth. The original rests in the National Museum in Addis Ababa; displays usually show a cast.
That she walked upright
The broad, bowl-shaped pelvis and the inward-angled femur are hallmarks of bipedal walking: in a creature with a chimp-sized brain.
Foto: Rama · CC BY-SA 3.0 fr · Wikimedia Commons
About the size of a chimpanzee's
Some 400 to 500 cubic centimetres: barely a third of ours. The head stayed small while the body already walked upright.
About 1.05 metres
And around 30 kilograms. Males of her species were considerably larger: a strong sex difference like that of gorillas today.
From the curved fingers and strong arms
Her hands and shoulders kept climbing adaptations: she probably slept in trees, safe from predators, and came down to walk.
From a fall from a great height
A 2016 study reads the fractures in her arm, shoulder and knee as typical fall injuries: possibly from a tree. The reading is not uncontested.
The Dikika child
A girl of about three, 3.3 million years old and thus older than Lucy: nicknamed "Lucy's baby" although she lived long before her.
About 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago
A remarkably long-lived species: it lasted about a million years, more than three times as long as Homo sapiens has existed so far.
Those of Laetoli
3.6 million years old, in Tanzania, preserved in volcanic ash: the most direct proof of upright walking: you can even see the roll over the ball of the foot.
Donald Johanson
The American palaeoanthropologist found her with student Tom Gray while surveying a site: a chance glance sideways at an elbow bone.
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