Lucy
Forty per cent of one skeleton settles the argument about what came first.
- When
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Pliocene, Cenozoic
The partial skeleton catalogued AL 288-1 was found at Hadar in 1974 and nicknamed for a Beatles song playing at the camp. At about 3.2 million years old and roughly 40 per cent complete, it preserved the pelvis, femur and knee together — enough to demonstrate unambiguously that this small-brained hominin walked upright. That combination overturned the prevailing expectation that a large brain had evolved first and freed the hands. Lucy is probably the most famous fossil ever found, and she is in Addis Ababa, not a Western museum.