The 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor known as Lucy rose to fame through an incredible combination of circumstances
Fifty years ago researchers working in the Afar region of Ethiopia recovered a remarkable fossil of an ancient relative of ours. This specimen of a female hominin, or member of, soon became the most famous fossil in the world. If you’ve ever had even a passing interest in human origins, you have probably heard of her. She goes by the name
When an animal dies on an open landscape, away from a lakeshore or stream channels, the soft tissues—muscles and ligaments—are consumed by scavengers large and small. The bones of the skeleton soon separate and break up, and in a remarkably short time, only fragments of the skeleton are left. There is nothing recognizable to fossilize. If the animal dies close enough to a lake or stream, there is a very small chance that one or more of its bones and teeth will be covered by a layer of sediment.
All four of Lucy’s main limb long bones are damaged or missing parts of the shaft, so their maximum length has to be estimated. Even so, enough of each bone is preserved to make it pretty clear that Lucy’s limb proportions—and thus the limb proportions ofthe species to which she belongs—are closer to those of chimpanzees and bonobos than they are to those of modern humans.
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