PEOPLING

Lucy Steps Into View

1974 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In November 1974, on a slope at Hadar in Ethiopia's Afar, a survey turned up some forty percent of a small skeleton 3.2 million years old: Lucy, of Australopithecus afarensis. For the first time, the body proportions of a human relative older than three million years could simply be measured. The mixture startled: arms proportioned like ours, legs strikingly short, a frame built for upright walking yet unlike any living body, and a gait whose efficiency would be argued over for decades.

Why it matters

Lucy made human evolution concrete for both science and the public: not a jaw or a tooth but a person-shaped skeleton with a name. Her anatomy showed that upright walking came long before big brains, reversing the expected order and recentring the story on locomotion. She stands at this timeline's edge as the emblem of all that came before it, three million years of walking before the first Homo sapiens.

Dating & uncertainty

The skeleton AL 288-1 was found at Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974; Lucy herself lived about 3.2 million years ago, far outside this timeline's window, which is why the fiche is anchored on the discovery. Her locomotion was argued over for decades, short hindlimbs set against human-like proportions, and later finds, including a larger and older skeleton, further established that her kind walked upright well.

Sources

1. Jungers (1982), Nature · Lucy's limbs: skeletal allometry and locomotion in Australopithecus afarensisdoi:10.1038/297676a0
2. Jungers & Stern (1983), Journal of Human Evolution · Body proportions, skeletal allometry and locomotion in the Hadar hominids: a reply to Wolpoffdoi:10.1016/s0047-2484(83)80007-4
3. Haile-Selassie et al. (2010), PNAS · An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopiadoi:10.1073/pnas.1004527107

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:4514.3 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day