Discovery of Lucy

Lucy is a partial skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis, found by the paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and the student Tom Gray at Hadar in the Afar region of Ethiopia. About forty percent of the skeleton was preserved, an unusually complete find for such an ancient hominin that lived about 3.2 million years ago. She was named after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which was playing in the expedition camp, and in Ethiopia she is called Dinknesh. Her pelvis and leg bones showed that she walked upright, while her long arms and curved fingers suggest she still climbed trees. Because her brain was small, the find showed that upright walking evolved before large brains in human ancestors.

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