This is why Lucy has been the face of human evolution for the last 50 years

The first clue that the fossilized human ancestor known as Lucy would be a global phenomenon came at a Paris airport in December 1974. While passing through customs, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson introduced the wrapped parcels in his bag as fossils from Ethiopia, and a customs official replied, “You mean Lucy?”

Just a few weeks earlier, Johanson and his team had discovered the bones of a small adult female, who appeared to be a long-lost member of our family tree. The ancient skeleton had yet to be examined and analyzed by researchers, but a press release had been enough to catapult her toward becoming arguably the most well-known fossil in history. 

At the time, there was “significant broad interest in human origins,” Johanson says. Finds by the Leakey family and other scientists in South Africa had begun filling in the human story, suggesting that early ancestors evolved upright posture millions of years ago in Africa, followed later by large brains and the ability to use tools.

Yet the fossils unearthed so far were fragmentary—a skull here, a partial foot there. And they dated to no more than 1.75 million years old, significantly younger than humans’ most distant ancestors were suspected to be. 

Lucy would go on to set records in age and completeness, while confirming ideas about humans’ evolutionary transition to upright walking. Other fossils have since surpassed her in achievements, but Lucy remains a household name 50 years later. The fossil’s scientific story has been entwined with a cultural one from the very beginning.

The lore of Lucy’s discovery

On November 24, 1974, Johanson was searching for fossils of ancient human relatives or hominins in an area called Hadar in the Afar region of Ethiopia, when he noticed a forearm bone eroding out of a hillside. Collecting the bone and returning to camp, Johanson and the field team celebrated that evening, singing along to the popular Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (or so the story goes). The next day, they excavated the rest of the hominin remains in 110-degree heat and started calling the skeleton Lucy. In scientific circles, she’s would later be known as AL 288-1, and in Ethiopia, as Dinkinesh, which mean “you are marvelous” in Amharic. 

Piecing together her lower jaw, skull fragments, vertebrae, ribs, arms, a pelvis, and legs, the team collected approximately 40 percent of Lucy’s skeleton. She appeared to be a fully grown adult, yet stood just over a meter tall. 

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(Here’s one theory on how Lucy died.)

The volcanic rock layers sandwiching the fossils dated her to 3.2 million years old—almost doubling the age of what was then the oldest known human ancestor. Beyond that, the next oldest skeleton at the time dated to only 100,000 years old. Such an ancient, complete specimen was remarkable. Lucy hit all the superlatives, science writer for the New York Times Boyce Rensberger remembers, “the oldest and most complete.”

Based on the fragmented remains of her skull and other finds at Hadar, Lucy seemed to have a small, chimpanzee-sized brain and projecting face, but the rest of her skeleton indicated a fully erect, human-like posture. In 1978, Johanson and colleagues officially assigned her to a new species, Australopithecus afarensis (the southern ape from the Afar in Latin), and declared she was proof our ancestors walked on two legs before evolving large brains.