Lucy

Reconstruction of Lucy's skull

Lucy (AL 288-1) is the set of bone fragments belonging to the skeleton of a hominid of the species Australopithecus afarensis, of 3.5 to 3.2 million years old, discovered by the team formed by the American Donald Johanson and the French Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb on November 24, 1974, 159 km from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

This is 40% of the skeleton of a specimen of around 1.10 meters in height, weighing approximately 27 kg (in life), approximately 20 years old (the wisdom teeth were recently erupted). Endowed with a skull comparable in size to that of a chimpanzee, Lucy walked on her hind limbs, a formal sign of an evolution towards hominization. Lucy's bipedal ability can be deduced from the shape of her pelvis, as well as her knee joint.

The relative robustness of the arms reinforces the idea that he spent a significant amount of time using them to move through the trees.

The name Lucy comes from the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by the band The Beatles, which researchers heard on a radio while celebrating this event.

Until 1978, the scientific community did not take into consideration the finding of Johanson and his team from the International Afar Research Expedition. The magazine Kirtlandia agreed to publish the discovery of the new hominid, to which its authors assigned the scientific name Australopithecus afarensis.

Subsequently, remains belonging to a minimum of six individuals were found in the same site, two of them were children of about five years old, but the most complete skeleton was that of Lucy, of whom a total of 52 bones were found.

Lucy's remains are currently stored in a safe at the National Museum in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Dating of Lucy's remains

Dating of a layer of volcanic material at the site, by the potassium-argon method, gave an initial age of 3 million years with a margin of ±200,000 years. However, the material had certain impurities, making the dating not very precise. By applying other methods, such as biostratigraphy and paleomagnetism, among others, the dating was corrected to an age of 3,200,000 to 3,500,000 million years.