Lucy is one of the most complete and famous early human skeletons that we have ever found, from a species called Australopithecus afarensis, or the Southern Ape of Afar, which is a region in Ethiopia. Lucy was discovered by anthropologist Donald Johanson in 1974, as part of an otherwise unsuccessful mission. Lucy was a huge discovery, with an astonishing 40% of the skeleton unearthed.
Lucy was named such because at the time of her discovery, the team that found her kept playing the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ as a form of celebration. However, what’s more important is the fact that from the moment of her discovery scientists have known that Lucy’s species, Au. afarensis, was fully bipedal but had small, chimpanzee-like brains. This proved the theory that bipedalism came before brain enlargement. Later discoveries of Ardipithecus and Sahelanthropus proved that as well.
Australopithecus afarensis, though, was probably not a direct ancestor of ours. At 3.2 millions years ago and a gorilla-like skull and jaw, it was probably on its way already to become the ancestors of Paranthropus, one of the more ‘regressing’ families of apes, who had massive skulls and sagittal crests, with huge jaw muscles that enabled them to eat tough grasses. It shared the neighborhood (which is namely, East Africa) with Kenyanthropus platyops, the first of the apes to start using stone tools.
Nobody knows how Lucy died. There is evidence of a wound on her leg, but this did not lead to her death. Some scientists suggested that Lucy fell from a tree, but others disagreed. It might be as well that we don’t know because later, we are going to be talking about a specimen that we definitely know how it died, and it didn’t have a particularly good or pleasant one either (well, death isn’t pleasant but you know what I mean).
Anay Ganesh 