Читать книгу Introducing Anthropology - Laura Pountney - Страница 19

Lucy was discovered in 1974 by anthropologist Professor Donald Johanson and his student Tom Gray, at Hadar in northern Ethiopia, and became one of the best documented of all early humans. Johanson and Gray named their fossil skeleton Lucy, after the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, which was playing on the radio when the team was celebrating its discovery back at camp. The significance of this discovery was that it confirmed that bipedalism, the ability to walk on two legs, not four, was a key to what makes humans distinctive.

Johanson immediately recognized the bones as belonging to a hominid, and his team eventually unearthed forty-seven bones of a single skeleton dating from 3.2 million years ago. Based on the small size and pelvis shape, they concluded that the skeleton was that of a young female. Like a chimpanzee, Lucy had a small brain, long dangly arms and short legs. However, the structure of her knee and pelvis show that she usually walked upright on two legs.