Editor-DN
A fossilized skeleton, Australopithecus afarensis, known by its nickname ‘Lucy’, was discovered 50 years ago this month by researchers in the Afar region of Ethiopia. This ultimately changed scientists’ understanding of human evolution.
Opening a new chapter in human history, on November 24, 1974, a discovery by American paleontologist and graduate student Tom Gray, Don Johansen, provided evidence that 3.2 million years ago ancient hominins could walk upright on two legs. . recently developed, CNN Reported
Lucy had a mixture of ape-like and human-like traits, indicating that she occupied an important branch in the human family tree. Over the past few decades, it has stimulated a number of studies and debates, in addition to fueling wider public attention to human origins.
Although researchers have now discovered fossil hominins twice as old as Lucy, she remains an important subject for scientific study.
At the time it was found, Lucy had 47 bones and was the oldest and most complete skeleton of an ancient human ancestor.
Recalling his 1974 trip to Ethiopia, Don Johansen told CNN that he was walking through the sediments to find the fossilized remains of a variety of animals 3.2 million years old, “but especially our The remains of the ancestors.”
“I looked over my right shoulder. If I had looked over my left shoulder, I would have missed it,” he said.
At first he saw a small piece of bone, a small part of the elbow, and a part of the arm.
Johansen said he could “immediately tell that it was from a human ancestor,” adding that when he and his student, Tom Gray, near knelt down to look at it, they saw “pieces of a skull and pieces of a pelvis and pieces of a limb. An arm bone and a leg bone.” Bone.”
“I realized at that moment that this was a childhood dream… I always wanted to go to Africa and find something and by the bullet it was something. But we didn’t know how much of an icon it would become in the study. Johansson said. said
At the time of discovery, Lucy’s bones were “very fragile” because they had metamorphosed into stone. So, the team “crawled very carefully to pick up the clear pieces,” before putting them in burlap bags.
Later, they washed them with river water through fine screening. The entire process took two and a half weeks.
It was great to see Lucy together on the lab table in the field, Johansen recalled. “The femur there was only a foot long, or 28 centimeters. What is that? I thought. Is it a baby? Well, let’s look at the jaw. The wisdom teeth were out so she was an adult. But my God! If it was an adult, it should have been only three and a half feet tall, a meter long,” he added.
When asked how she got the name Lucy, Johansson said that her bones were delicate and short, so he thought “she was probably a woman.”
He went on to say that while Lucy’s species did not directly give rise to modern humans, “its important place on the human family tree led to all subsequent hominin species, most of which became extinct.”
“The Homo lineage persisted and eventually gave rise to us, Homo sapiens,” he concluded.
