Fifty years ago, the discovery of a partial skeleton amid the barren desert landscape of northern Ethiopia transformed our understanding of where humans came from, and how we developed into Homo sapiens.
“Lucy” was first spotted on November 24 1974 by the American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and his student assistant Tom Gray. Named after the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a popular song in the their team’s camp at the time, it was immediately clear she was a female, because of her small adult size, and that she had walked upright, unlike chimpanzees.
Lucy was also very old – at almost 3.2 million years, she was anointed as the then-earliest known (distant) ancestor of modern humans. Over the following decades, rather fittingly given her name, she became a “paleo-rock star”, going on a US tour from 2006 following a deal with the Ethiopian authorities.
