Fifty years on, how Lucy, the mother of humanity, changed our understanding of evolution

Lucy, the 3.2m-year-old skeleton of an Australopithecus
afarensis female, on display at the National Museum
 of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa.
Photograph: Edwin Remsberg/Alamy

On 24 November 1974, the US anthropologist Donald Johanson was scrabbling through a ravine at Hadar in the Afar region of Ethiopia with his research student, Tom Gray. The pair were looking for fossilised animal bones in the surrounding silt and ash when Johanson spotted a tiny fragment of arm bone – and realised it belonged to a human-like creature.

“We looked up the slope,” Johanson later recalled. “There, incredibly, lay a multitude of bone fragments – a nearly complete lower jaw, a thighbone, ribs, vertebrae, and more! Tom and I yelled, hugged each other, and danced, mad as any Englishman in the midday sun!”

Johanson and Gray drove back to their camp in jubilation, their Land Rover horn blaring. Beer was cooled in the Awash river and barbecued goat was served to celebrate their discovery – which, by any account, was a sensational one. A total of 47 bones from a single, ancient hominin (the term used to define humans and all our extinct bipedal relatives) were ultimately uncovered by Johanson and Gray at the site.

By Robin McKie.

Full story at Yahoo News.