Lucy
Sign in to savefossilized skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis
AI overview
Lucy is a fossilized skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis, an early human ancestor that lived about 3.2 million years ago in Africa. She is significant because her well-preserved remains have provided scientists with crucial evidence about how our early ancestors walked upright and what they looked like before the evolution of the modern human brain.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Catalog number span no
- AL 288-1
- Common name
- Lucy
- Species
- Australopithecus afarensis
- Age
- 3.2 million years
- Place discovered
- Hadar, Ethiopia
- Date discovered
- November 24, 1974 ; 51 years ago ( 1974-11-24 )
- Discovered by
- Donald Johanson Maurice Taieb Yves Coppens Tom Gray
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
AL 288-1, commonly known as Lucy or Dinkʼinesh (Amharic: ድንቅ ነሽ, romanized: dənkə näš, lit. 'you are marvellous'), is a collection of several hundred pieces of fossilized bone comprising 40 percent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis. It was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, at Hadar, a site in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle, by Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Lucy is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton presents a small skull akin to that of non-hominin apes, plus evidence of a walking-gait that was bipedal and upright, akin to that of humans (and other hominins); this combination supports the view of human evolution that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size. A 2016 study proposes that Australopithecus afarensis was, at least partly, tree-dwelling, though the extent of this is debated.