50 years on, Lucy still sparks our curiosity

Paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray had discovered Lucy’s fossilized bones a few years earlier (SN: 1/4/75, p. 4). That spectacular moment 50 years ago quickly upended how many scientists thought about human evolution. Until then, the history of our species was drawn as an orderly progression, with one member of the big-brained Homo species leading to the next. The famed anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, and later their son Richard, had spent decades excavating fossils that they said supported that theory. Lucy, who walked upright like a human but had a petite brain and other apelike features, didn’t fit in. Her existence proved that the story was more complicated — and much more interesting.

As Bruce Bower, Science News’ behavioral sciences writer, reports in this issue, scientists knew of only a few hominid species when Lucy’s partial skeleton was discovered in 1974 (SN: 11/13/24, p. 18). Today, scientists recognize more than 20 hominid species, including Lucy’s Australopithecus afarensis. “Johanson calls that particular point in time the beginning of a golden decade in paleoanthropology,” Bower told me. “It was changing the way everyone thought.”

Even for those of us who have been reading about Lucy for decades, Bower’s retelling of the tale is a treat. Lore has it that she was named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which was playing on repeat at a celebration in camp the evening of her discovery. Bower, a longtime Beatles fan, doesn’t shirk from further invoking the Fab Four. He notes that other fossils discovered nearby helped Lucy top “the hominid hit parade with a little help from her friends.” And he uses the lyric “I thought I knew you, what did I know?” from the song “I’m Looking Through You” to address hot-topic questions about Lucy, including whether she climbed trees, what she ate and whether she and her compatriots used stone tools.

The gully where Lucy was found lies in a parched, treeless desert. But when I look at the photos from the 1974 dig, the people toiling away in that heat and dust look so happy. Perhaps the photos were taken after they found Lucy, a major discovery made after weeks, months — who knows, possibly years — of fruitless toil. It was the day when they finally found a fossil that changed everything. Or maybe the photos were taken before the debut of our celebrity hominid, and those smiling, dusty people were just happy to be doing the work.

Today, scholars of human evolution have many more tools at their disposal than did the crew in Ethiopia. That includes ancient DNA analysis that has revolutionized our ability to better identify hominid populations and the relationships between them, including the genetic connections between Neandertals and present-day humans.

It’s not known if Lucy and her kind are among our direct distant ancestors; like many things in the study of human evolution, it’s debated. But she can count me among her many fans.