What Did Scientists Learn From Other Fossils Found In The Same Sediment Layer As Ardi
The Australopithecus has been around for a while now—and then has our knowledge of that human ancestor. The species Australopithecus africanus ("the southern ape of Africa") was first classified based on a skull found in 1924, which seemed to have characteristics of both humans and apes merely which conspicuously belonged to a creature that walked upright, based on the position of the spinal cord.
For the next 50 years or and so, new human ancestors were discovered every now and and so, including different Australopithecus species—just it was in the 1970s that a "surge of discoveries" brought a new level of understanding to human origins. One of those big discoveries was the famous skeleton known as Lucy, who was found on this day, Nov. 24, in 1974:
In 1972 Maurice Taieb, 40, of France's National Heart for Scientific Research, and Donald Carl Johanson, 34, of Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, constitute rock tools dating dorsum 2.6 million years in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Two years later their squad made an even more dramatic discovery. Not far from their first find, they [afterwards] uncovered the fossilized remnants of a 20-year-erstwhile female person Australopithecus lying in a layer of sediment 3 million years old. Different almost other fossils of early man —a tooth here, a bone fragment there, occasionally a portion of a skull—this ane comprised a skillful part of the skeleton.
Named after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lucy was a pocket-size brute, non much more than a meter alpine, with a brain capacity most a 3rd that of modern man. Lucy'southward skeleton gave scientists their best clues however to the proportions of Australopithecus, and revealed her to be surprisingly brusque-legged. But the find left no doubts that she walked erect. The shape of her pelvis showed clearly that she was bipedal.
A few years would pass, however, before the full importance of Lucy would become clear. It was early 1979 when Time declared her a "front end-page celebrity" later on Johanson appear the Lucy was a specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, a whole dissimilar species from those previously known Australopithecus examples. Significantly, she dated to a menstruation before hominids split into the brand that led to us and the ane that led to extinction. "The implications, says Johanson, are profound," Fourth dimension noted. "Outset, the old notion that human became bipedal as his encephalon grew is certainly faux: Lucy was pocket-sized-brained, simply could stand cock. 2nd, because Lucy is basically so archaic, man may accept carve up from his ape ancestors much afterwards than 15 million years ago, as is commonly supposed."
Others in the field, even so, like Richard Leakey (son of the famous anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey and a laic that the common ancestor lived before than Lucy did), disputed some of Johanson's analysis that afarensis was a single, carve up species.
Despite quibbles over classification, there's no question that Lucy was and is important to our understanding of human development. In 2012, scientist Derek Rossi nominated the spot where she was constitute for TIME's list of the most influential places in history: "The single nearly meaning place in human history is where hominids first evolved and emerged," he said. "More specifically, the Afar region of Ethiopia has been the site where many of the almost significant early hominid fossils accept been unearthed, including the Australopithecus afarensis fossil find by Donald Johanson, dubbed Lucy."
Read a 1977 encompass story about Richard Leakey'southward work, here in the Time Vault: Puzzling Out Human's Ascension
Go our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and run into highlights from the archives.
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Source: https://time.com/4126011/lucy-australopithecus-discovery/
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