Australopithecus Afarensis
"Darwinian Man, though well behaved, At best is only a monkey shaved!"
Contents Updated: Tuesday, August 24, 1999
Lucy
Lucy is the name Johanson gave to the fossil remains of an early hominid later shown to be some four million years old. The skeletal fragments were of a female and, when the prospectors returned to camp to tell of their discovery, a tape recorder was playing the Beatles’ recording of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. And so the remains were christened Lucy.
Johanson had woken that day feeling that something terrific might happen and, although pressed by organizational and bureaucratic work, he had agreed to go with a young graduate student, Tom Gray, to show him a site called Locality 162. After four hours on site they were beginning to get tired in the hot Ethiopian sun. Still feeling lucky, Johanson determined to take a quick look at a small gully that had already been expertly surveyed no less than twice by other members of the expedition. The pair were just about to leave when Johanson casually said to Gray, look, that’s a bit of hominid arm.
One of the most significant finds in human prehistory had been made and on a site that had already been thoroughly surveyed, just because a young and relatively inexperienced team leader had a hunch and felt lucky.
Lucy is the most complete ancient human skeleton yet discovered. She was 40 per cent complete, an hominid, that is an erect walking primate (her pelvis had fully adapted to the upright stance), only about four feet tall but full grown. In fact she must have been aged at least 20 because her wisdom teeth had erupted fully. Her head looked primitive and her brain was not much bigger than a chimpanzee’s with a volume of about 400 cm^3. She was a four feet high ape with a human looking body but underdeveloped skull and brain. The human race obviously still had a long way to come in the four million years between then and now, but Lucy already showed clear distinctions from the other apes. The shape of her hip bones and her upright posture signal Lucy (or Australopithecus afarensis, to use the scientific name) as being closer to us than the chimpanzee, the closest living relative of man.
Though the difference between humans and chimpanzees is only about one per cent according to protein and DNA matching, the physiological and cultural differences are astonishing. Skeletal structure and posture, skin, muscles, brain, intelligence, speech, ability to make tools and social organization all differ remarkably for such close relatives, showing that humans have differentiated themselves very distinctly from other apes, including Lucy, in a puzzlingly short time. What difference of habitat or experience initiated these changes from the ancestral common stock, and what continued them after her? These are admittedly difficult questions to answer but perhaps an examination of the history of the primates, the mammalian order to which we belong, from the demise of the dinosaurs to the present time will yield some clues.
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