matchless fossil discovery above all has transformed views of how we became human. hardly who was Lucy, and why is she so important to human evolution?
Lucy was observed in 1974 by anthropologist Professor Donald Johanson and his student Tom colour in a maze of ravines at Hadar in blue Ethiopia. Johanson and Gray were out searching the scorched terrain for animal mug up in the sand, ash and silt when they spotted a bantam fragment of arm bone.
Discovery of a lifetime
Johanson in a flash recognized it as belonging to a hominid. As they looked up the slope, they saw more bone fragments: ribs, vertebrae, thighbones and a partial jawbone.
They in conclusion unearthed 47 bones of a skeleton - nearly 40% of a hominid, or humanlike creature, that lived around 3.2 million years ago. Based on its small size, and pelvic shape, they concluded it was egg-producing(prenominal) and named it Lucy aft(prenominal) Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the Beatles song playing on the radio when Johanson and his team were celebrating the discovery back at camp.
An upright chimp
Like a chimpanzee, Lucy had a small brain, long, dangly arms, short legs and a cone-shaped thorax with a large belly. But the complex body part of her knee and pelvis show that she routinely walked upright on two legs, like us.
This form of locomotion, known as bipedalism, is the wholeness most important difference between humans and apes, placing Lucy firm within the human family.
Bipedalism is the most distinctive, apparently earliest, defining peculiar(prenominal) of humans, says Johanson, now director of the Institute of Human Origins at azimuth State University.
Admired from Afar
Johanson named Lucys species Australopithecus afarensis, which means southern ape of Afar, after the Ethiopian region where Hadar is located.
3.5 million years ago, Australopithecus afarensis foraged for fruit, gaga and seeds in a mixture of savannah and woodland. It may in addition have obtained animal...If you want to get a full essay, target it on our website: Orderessay
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