Fossil Hunters Find Lucy in Ethiopia

On the morning of 24 November 1974, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray were surveying a dusty gully at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia. The site, situated in the Afar Triangle, had already yielded hominin fossils during an earlier expedition season. While turning to leave, Johanson noticed an arm bone lying on the slope. A closer look revealed a piece of a small skull, a section of a thigh bone, vertebrae, ribs, and fragments of a pelvis and jaw. Over the following weeks, the team excavated several hundred bone fragments without any duplication, confirming that the collection came from a single individual.

Cataloged as AL 288-1, the specimen represents roughly forty percent of the skeleton of an adult female belonging to the species Australopithecus afarensis. In camp on the evening of the discovery, members of the expedition played the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds repeatedly on a tape recorder, inspiring the nickname Lucy. In Ethiopia, the fossil is also known as Dink'inesh, an Amharic phrase meaning you are marvellous. With permission from Ethiopian authorities, Johanson brought the fragments to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where they were studied and reconstructed with the help of anatomist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University. The original bones were later returned and are now kept at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.