“Feeling really lucky,” Donald Johanson wrote in his diary the morning of 24 November 1974, while staying at a remote camp in northern Ethiopia’s Afar region. Hours later, the palaeoanthropologist, now at Arizona State University in Tempe, happened upon the 3.2-million-year-old remains of a small-bodied early human, possibly on the lineage that gave rise to Homo sapiens. He and his collaborators named it Australopithecus afarensis, and the skeleton became known to the world as Lucy. Forty years on, Johanson, now 71, talks about the discovery and Lucy’s enduring importance and appeal.
What did scientists know about early human evolution before Lucy?
Before my discoveries at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia, we had relatively few fossil species, and only a handful that were as old as 3 million years: There was a piece of arm, a single tooth, a chunk of jaw and maybe a bit of skull. But we didn’t have any idea of what early hominids looked like.
What made Lucy so important?
She told us a lot about bipedalism: that changes in the foot, the ankle, the knee and the hip happened well before Lucy, because the biomechanics of bipedalism in afarensis are virtually identical to our own. I think she was also very important because she drew attention to an entirely new segment in the Great Rift Valley, one that had been overlooked for so long because of its remoteness. She was a real catalyst for field workers.
Read full, original article: Lucy discoverer on the ancestor people relate to
