Forty years ago, on a Sunday morning in late November 1974, a team of scientists digging in the Afar region of Ethiopia made a ground-breaking finding.
Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson spotted a small part of an elbow bone. He immediately recognised it as coming from a human ancestor. “As I looked up the slopes to my left I saw bits of the skull, a chunk of jaw, a couple of vertebrae,” Johanson said.
“I realised this was part of a skeleton that was older than three million years,” Johanson said.
It was the most ancient early human – or hominin – ever found. Later it became apparent that it was also the most complete: fully 40% of the skeleton had been preserved.
At the group’s camp site 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. So someone said to him: “Why don’t you call it Lucy?” The name stuck immediately.
But at the camp site the morning after the discovery, the discussion was dominated by questions. Forty years later, we are starting to have answers to some of these questions.
Though she was a new species, Lucy was not the first Australopithecus found. That was the Taung Child, the fossilised skull of a young child who lived about 2.8 million years ago in Taung, South Africa, who was discovered in 1924 and studied by anatomist Raymond Dart. He called it Australopithecus africanus.
Dart wrote: “I knew at a glance that what lay in my hands was no ordinary anthropoidal brain. Here in lime-consolidated sand was the replica of a brain three times as large as that of a baboon and considerably bigger than that of an adult chimpanzee…”
Over the next 25 years, more evidence emerged and showed that Dart had been right all along.
