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Lucy

Don Johanson changed a great deal of what we know about the evolution when he uncovered the oldest hominid in the fossil record. A hominid is the family of mankind and their ancestors. Johansen nicknamed his find "Lucy," after "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," a song by the Beatles.

Johansen was able to find Lucy because of a lucky occurrence that was not very lucky for Lucy. Lucy apparently became entangled while walking near stream about three million years ago. She fell into the water and drowned. Her body sank into the mud and her flesh slowly decomposed. Minerals from the water slowly replaced the calcium in her bones. In time, the swampy marshland turned to desert. In 1974, Johansen happened to be in the exact spot of East Africa where rainwater washed away the dirt from the now long dried lake, and brought Lucy's remains to the surface.

Lucy's brain was about one-third the size of the brain of a human, but Lucy had a human like characteristic: her knee could lock, so she could stand up straight. Other apes did not have a locking knee, so they could not stand for long periods of time. Johansen deduced that the locking knee gave Lucy and others like her an advantage over other apes.

Until Johanson's find, archaeologists believed that apes grew smarter, then learned to walk upright. We now know that hominid brains grew larger only after they gained a small advantage over other animals. This is an example of how scientific theories change over time.

To cite this page:
Dowling, Mike, "Mr. Dowling's Lucy page," available from http://www.mrdowling.com/602-lucy.html; Internet; updated Saturday, October 23, 2004 . ©2008, Mike Dowling. All rights reserved.