Lucy is a 3.18 million year old female hominid, of the genus Australopithecus, whose skeleton was discovered on November 24, 1974 by Donald Johanson, Yves Coppens and Tim White in the Afar Depression of Ethiopia. They named it "Lucy" in reference to the famous Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was played as they celebrated their find. The discoverers dubbed Lucy Australopithecus afarensis -literally "southern ape from East Africa" --one of the earliest species of hominids, the family of bipedal primates that includes homo hablis and homo erectus. While Australopithecus and Homo species differ in many ways, both hominids share characteristics that define them as a group. The most conspicuous of these traits is bipedal locomotion, or walking upright.
The distinctive and revolutionary characteristics of Lucy is that she had a small skull, bipedal knee structure, and molars and front teeth of human style and size. She stood about 42 inches high and weighed 60-65 pounds. "Lucy's species was found to be strongly dimorphic, with the males much taller and probably twice as strong as the females." (PBS, 2002) This implies a complex social and mating system. Evidence shows that she was probably young but fully mature when she died of natural causes. Her corpse likely sunk into the soft sediment on the banks of the Awash, where she remained undisturbed for more than 3 million years.
According to Dr. William Kimbel, a physical anthropologist at the Institute of Human Origins and Arizona State University, the discovery of Lucy, "perhaps the most famous fossil of all time", "revolutionized our understanding of human evolution". (IHO, 2005) Essentially, Lucy is one of the "missing links" anthropologists have been searching for since the late 1800's. Before her discovery, scientists reasoned that the main trait separating humans from apes was intelligence, represented by the cranial capacity of the skull. Intelligence was ...