50 years on, Lucy still sparks our curiosity

Since her public debut in 1978, Lucy has been on a first-name basis with the arena. Now not bad for somebody from rural Ethiopia who had been an unknown for 3.2 million years or so.

Paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray had came upon Lucy’s fossilized bones about a years earlier (SN: 1/four/Seventy five, p. four). That spectacular moment 50 years ago quickly upended what collection of scientists considered human evolution. Until then, the history of our species was once drawn as an orderly progression, with one member of the huge-brained Homo species leading to the next. The famed anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, and later their son Richard, had spent decades excavating fossils that they said supported that theory. Lucy, who walked upright like a human but had a petite brain and other apelike features, didn’t slot in. Her existence proved that the story was once more complicated — and an awful lot more interesting.

As Bruce Bower, Science News’ behavioral sciences writer, reports on this issue, scientists knew of handiest some hominid species when Lucy’s partial skeleton was once came upon in 1974 (SN: eleven/thirteen/24, p. 18). As of late, scientists recognize more than 20 hominid species, including Lucy’s Australopithecus afarensis. “Johanson calls that specific cut-off date the start of a golden decade in paleoanthropology,” Bower told me. “It was once changing the manner every person thought.”

Even for those of us who have been reading about Lucy for decades, Bower’s retelling of the story is a treat. Lore has it that she was once named after the Beatles song “Lucy all through the Sky with Diamonds,” which was once playing on repeat at a celebration in camp the evening of her discovery. Bower, a longtime Beatles fan, doesn’t shirk from further invoking the Fab Four. He notes that other fossils came upon nearby helped Lucy top “the hominid hit parade with a bit assist from her friends.” And he uses the lyric “I believed I knew you, what did I do know?” from the song “I’m Having a look Through You” to address hot-topic questions about Lucy, including whether she climbed trees, what she ate and whether she and her compatriots used stone tools.

The gully where Lucy was once found lies in a parched, treeless desolate tract. But when I examine the photos from the 1974 dig, the people toiling away in that heat and dust look so happy. Maybe the photos were taken after they found Lucy, a main discovery made after weeks, months — who knows, possibly years — of fruitless toil. It was once the day when they finally found a fossil that changed the total thing. Or maybe the photos were taken before the debut of our megastar hominid, and those smiling, dusty people were just happy to be doing the work.

As of late, scholars of human evolution have many more tools at their disposal than did the crew in Ethiopia. That features ancient DNA analysis that has revolutionized our ability to higher perceive hominid populations and the relationships between them, including the genetic connections between Neandertals and present-day humans.

It’s now now not known if Lucy and her kind are among our direct far away ancestors; like many things all through the learn about of human evolution, it’s debated. But she can count me among her many fans.