Stunning Discovery of ‘Lucy’ Fossil Revealed Humans Were Walking On Feet 3.2 Million Years Ago

Experts find human evolution a complicated subject. Over the years, with discoveries worldwide, the subject of evolution has garnered more clarity. Usually, these findings build on each other, but Lucy's discovery in 1974 broke the mold, HISTORY reported. The 3.2 million-year-old fossil brought another species into the scheme of things and proved that ancient hominins walked around on two feet for a million more years than previously thought.

Dozens of fossilized bones were discovered by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and his team on the International Afar Research Expedition in Ethiopia, Live Science reported. Pamela Alderman, another member of the expedition suggested the unique name 'Lucy', inspired by the popular song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Analysis over the years has revealed that Lucy and her kind were essentially the halfway point in human evolution. 

Johanson and his team recovered 47 bones in total, and included, a thigh bone, a pelvis, and fragments of a skull and jawbone, HISTORY reported. The group collected all of them together to construct a detailed anatomical model of a hominin that lived more than three million years ago.

"This was damn significant," Johanson stated. "It was a hominin skeleton from a geological layer that was estimated at that time to be older than three million years. So this was a moment of incredible exhilaration. I mean, here it was right at my feet."

Lucy's discovery was prominent because for the first time, humans found fossils of an ancestor that looked remarkably like themselves, Live Science reported. Before Lucy, humans had never witnessed such a close similarity to predecessors in the evolution map. "If we saw her coming out of a grocery store today, we would recognize her as upright walking and some kind of human," Johanson said.

Lucy's discovery compelled scientists to rewrite their evolutionary timeline, HISTORY reported. They now had to account for an ancestor who had both humanlike and apelike traits. A year after the breakthrough finding, a group of researchers unearthed ancient remains of a group of 17 individuals from the same site. On analysis, they were found to be related to Lucy. The Ethiopian fossils were given the moniker 'First Family,' because of their common origins.

Experts compared Lucy and the other remains with available specimens of ancient humans and without a doubt claimed that the 'First Family' represented a previously unknown species of humans, HISTORY reported. This species was named Australopithecus afarensis after the Afar region of Ethiopia.

Johansen spent years to prove that Lucy was bipedal, meaning that she walked on two feet, HISTORY reported. "Lucy had a pelvis that wasn’t tall and narrow like a quadruped, but short and squat like a human," says Johanson, "like the one we're all sitting on."

Despite his explanations, many had doubts, because of the fossil's age. Apart from Lucy and her 'family', no hominin from that time had been discovered. Considering that both findings were from the same site, experts did not feel confident in accepting the assertion that human ancestors entered the global picture 3.2 million years ago.

Johansen was proven correct when researchers found a set of human footprints captured in fossilized ash in Tanzania, HISTORY reported. The discovery happened in 1978 and was uncovered alongside fossilized teeth and jaw fragments.

Examination revealed that the dental evidence in both Lucy's and Tanzania's cases matched with each other. "The footprints that were found are identical to the footprints you and I leave in the beach sand," says Johanson. "There’s really no longer any controversy about Lucy upright walking."

Over the years older fossils have been found but none have been able to match Lucy's impact, Live Science reported. "She's our touchstone," Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth College said. "Everything sort of comes back to her as the reference point, and she deserves it."