Mother of man - 3.2 million years ago

1 ANSWERS

1. Brett
   

   Lucy was discovered in 1974 by anthropologist Professor Donald Johanson and his student Tom Gray in a maze of ravines at Hadar in northernEthiopia.Johanson and Gray were out searching the scorched terrain for animal bones in the sand, ash and silt when they spotted a tiny fragment of arm bone.
   Johanson immediately recognised it as belonging to a hominid. As they looked up the slope, they saw more bone fragments: ribs, vertebrae, thighbones and a partial jawbone.They eventually unearthed 47 bones of a skeleton - nearly 40% of a hominid, or humanlike creature, that lived around 3.2 million years ago. Based on its small size, and pelvic shape, they concluded it was female and named it 'Lucy' after 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds', the Beatles song playing on the radio when Johanson and his team were celebrating the discovery back at camp.
   Like a chimpanzee, Lucy had a small brain, long, dangly arms, short legs and a cone-shaped thorax with a large belly. But the structure of her knee and pelvis show that she routinely walked upright on two legs, like us.This form of locomotion, known as 'bipedalism', is the single most important difference between humans and apes, placing Lucy firmly within the human family."Bipedalism is the most distinctive, apparently earliest, defining characteristic of humans," says Johanson, now director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

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