Despite these more recent breakthroughs, Lucy still stands as perhaps the most famous hominid fossil discovery ever made. "I know there are several others [species] lurking on the horizon.". When an American graduate student named Tom Gray announced he was leaving to scout out a nearby fossil site, Johanson had a hunch he should tag along. It also seems that Lucy's childhood was much shorter than ours, and that she had to fend for herself from a young age. View image of The Taung Child (Credit: The Natural History Museum, London), I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoidal brain. “She showed us conclusively that upright walking and bipedalism preceded all of the other changes we’d normally consider being human…” he said.

(Credit: Jenny Vaughan/AFP/Getty Images). Lucy was small compared to males of her species. He immediately recognised it as coming from a human ancestor.

The first hominins did not need bigger brains to take defining steps away from apes. "As I looked up the slopes to my left I saw bits of the skull, a chunk of jaw, a couple of vertebrae," says Johanson.
It could also be a fossil that we haven't found yet. How old was Lucy when she died? Lucy, nickname for a remarkably complete (40 percent intact) hominin skeleton found by Donald Johanson at Hadar, Eth., on Nov. 24, 1974, and dated to 3.2 million years ago. Johanson poses with Lucy’s skull at an Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, museum on May 7, 2013. A more ancient or complete specimen had never been discovered. Starting in 1976, Johanson and U.C. There were many species of early hominin, often living side by side, When she was discovered, Lucy was hailed as the oldest direct ancestor of modern humans. His international field team had already found leg bones and several jaws that were among the oldest examples of hominids—the family of bipedal primates that includes humans and their ancestors—and Johanson was convinced that an even bigger discovery was in the offing.

The specimen is usually classified as Australopithecus afarensis and suggests—by having long arms, short legs, an apelike

"Without bipedalism one starts to wonder what would have happened to our lineage. But when he took a closer look, he saw that many of her features were significantly more primitive than other Australopithecine specimens. News of “Ardi” first came to light in 1994, but since then, scientists have found evidence of even older hominids dating back as far as 7 million years ago. Even today scientists are still learning from her. Lucy's childhood was much shorter than ours.

All told, the pieces amounted to about 40 percent of what appeared to be at least a three million-year-old hominid skeleton. Over the next 25 years, more evidence emerged and showed that Dart had been right all along. That night, the jubilant field team celebrated the discovery over dinner and several cans of beer. Along with the expedition’s co-director, the French geologist Maurice Taieb, Johanson and the rest of the field team spent the next several days scouring the Lucy discovery site. Older fossils, such as the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus described by White and his colleagues, are closer to our ape ancestors. Studies of afarensis shoulder bones have shown that Lucy most likely spent as much time climbing trees as she did walking upright on the ground, and other evidence has shown that she may have been a social animal that lived in small family units. And there was plenty more. It now looks like Lucy did not take us as close to our common ancestor with chimps as everyone thought. At the time, Europe and Asia was thought to be the crucial hub for human evolution, and scientists did not accept that Africa was an important site.

Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). What was she like? But the real reason for heading to the ground may have been to search for food, says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, UK. This media cannot be played on your device. Later fossil finds from the Hadar area, and comparisons with other primates, suggest that Lucy lived in a small social group. When Lucy was found, about seven early hominins were known.

Read about our approach to external linking. All appeared to belong to the same skeleton. When the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” came on, someone suggested calling the new skeleton “Lucy.” The name stuck. All told, Johanson and other researchers eventually collected fossils belonging to several hundred different Australopithecus afarensis individuals. In the years since Lucy was lifted from her 3.2-million-year-old grave, anthropologists have gone on to find older and even more complete fossil remains of early human ancestors.

Studies of the remains of food trapped on preserved hominin teeth show that several species, including Lucy's, were expanding their diet around 3.5 million years ago. Previously it had been thought that A.anamensis had given way to Lucy's species, but dating of the volcanic sediment surrounding the fossil, showed the two species overlapped by 100,000 years. "Cut marks don't imply a stone has been beautifully modelled into a knife," says Spoor.

So where exactly does she fit into our family tree? There's no other mammal that walks the way we do. At the group's campsite that night, Johanson played a Beatles cassette that he had brought with him, and the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" came on.

By this time Johanson thought the skeleton was female, because it was small. These finds have helped bring Lucy and her kind into even sharper relief.

Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Reconstructed replica of the skull of “Lucy,” a 3.2-million-year-old. It would be more impressive if Lucy's species had also manufactured tools, but there is no evidence of that. In line with this idea, recent evidence suggests that australopithecines' diet was changing. That has led some researchers to suggest that her society was male-dominated. They called them “Australopithecus afarensis,” after the Afar Triangle in which Lucy was found. The duo compared Lucy to a so-called “First Family” of some 13 other skeletal remains found at Hadar as well as to a collection of hominid footprints excavated by famed anthropologist Mary Leakey in Laetoli, Tanzania. "We knew we were genetically incredibly close to chimpanzees, with the last common ancestor we shared with them estimated to be around six million years ago. “I felt it was one of those days…when something terrific might happen.” Ignoring the already scorching heat and the mountain of paperwork on his worktable, Johanson hopped in a Land Rover with Gray and made the four-mile journey to a gully on an ancient, dried out lakebed. Dr. Donald Johanson woke up on the morning of November 24, 1974, feeling lucky.

Lucy the Australopithecus, one of the oldest and the most complete hominid fossil ever found, may have been killed by a fall from a tree, scientists have indicated. Despite this, White says Lucy's species is still the best candidate for a direct ancestor, but that more fossil evidence from that time is needed. This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lucy-fossil. According to Johanson, perhaps her most important contribution was to "spark" a wave of research that has led to the discovery of many new species, like Ardipithecus and A. sediba.

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