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Lucy Australopithecus Facts & Worksheets

Lucy is the common name for the oldest bipedal hominin ever to be discovered by anthropologists. She is otherwise named AL 288-1.

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AL 288-1, often known as Lucy, is a compilation of several hundred fragments of fossilized bone constituting 40% of a female Australopithecus afarensis. The assemblage is also known as Dinkinesh in Ethiopia, which means “you are magnificent” in Amharic. Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History found Lucy in 1974 in Africa, near Hadar, a site in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle.

See the fact file below for more information on Lucy Australopithecus, or you can download our 23-page Lucy Australopithecus worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

Overview

  • The Lucy specimen is an early australopithecine from 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton has a tiny skull similar to that of non-hominin apes, as well as evidence of a bipedal and upright walking posture identical to that of humans (and other hominins); this combination supports the idea of human evolution that bipedalism preceded growth in brain size. 
  • According to a 2016 research, Australopithecus afarensis was likewise mostly tree-dwelling, albeit the extent of this is debatable. 
  • “Lucy” was named after the Beatles’ 1967 song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which was played loudly and continuously in the expedition camp all evening following the excavation team’s first day at the recovery site.
  • Lucy drew much attention once the finding became public, and she quickly became a household figure. Lucy became famous worldwide, and Johanson published the account of her discovery and reconstruction in a book. 
  • Beginning in 2007, the fossil assemblage and related artifacts were on public display in the United States for a six-year tour titled Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia.
  • Lucy was a shining star in the world of paleoanthropology at the time of her discovery: she was the oldest and most achieved hominin skeleton ever found; she was proof that bipedalism evolved before large modern-human-sized brains evolved, and her finding supported the scientific view that human evolution was a continuous thing involving the appearance and survival of transitional forms over long periods. 
  • Discussed the concerns of damaging the rare fossils; some museums opted to show casts of the fossil assemblage. In 2013, genuine fossils were returned to Ethiopia, and future offers utilized models.

Discovering Lucy

Organizing The Expedition

  • Maurice Taieb, a French geologist and paleoanthropologist, found the Hadar Formation for paleoanthropology in the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia’s Hararghe area in 1970; he identified its potential as a possible storehouse of human origins fossils and artifacts. 
  • Taieb established the International Afar Study Expedition (IARE) and asked three notable international scientists to join him on research missions to the region. 
  • Donald Johanson, an American paleoanthropologist, later founded the Institute of Human Origins, which is now part of Arizona State University. Mary Leakey, a well-known British paleoanthropologist; and Yves Coppens, a French paleoanthropologist now based at the Collège de France, France‘s most prestigious research institution.
  • An expedition was quickly organized, with four Americans and seven French volunteers, and in the fall of 1973, the team began investigating sites surrounding Hadar for evidence of human origins.

First Find

  • Johanson discovered a fossil at the top end of a shinbone that had been cut somewhat at the front in November 1971, near the end of the first field season. 
  • When he fitted the lower end of the femur to it, the angle of the knee joint demonstrated that this fossil, reference AL 129-1, was an upright walking hominin. 
  • This specimen was eventually determined to be more than three million years old, making it significantly older than other known hominid fossils at the time. 
  • The location was about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) from where “Lucy” was later discovered, in a rock strata 60 meters (200 feet) deeper than where the Lucy fragments were found.

Subsequent Findings

  • The following year, the crew returned for a second field season and discovered hominin jaws. Then, on November 24, 1974, along the Awash River, Johanson abandoned a plan to revise his field notes and accompanied doctoral student Tom Gray to look for bone fossils at Locality 162. 
  • According to Johanson’s subsequent (public) stories, he and Tom Gray spent two hours inspecting the sandy terrain on the increasingly scorching and arid plain. Johanson opted to investigate the bottom of a little gully that had already been investigated at least twice by previous employees.
  • Nothing was evident at first glance, but as they turned to leave, Johanson noticed a fossil; an arm piece of bone was lying on the hill. A chunk from the rear of a little skull was nearby. They saw a femur (thigh bone) fragment a few feet (approximately one meter) distant. 
  • As they investigated further, they discovered more and more bones on the hill, including vertebrae, pelvis, ribs, and jaw fragments. They recorded the location and returned to camp, ecstatic about finding so many parts that appeared to be from a single hominid.
  • The crew returned to the gully in the afternoon to split off the site and prepare it for thorough excavation and collecting, which took three weeks. 
  • That first evening at the camp, they dubbed fossil AL 288-1 “Lucy,” after the Beatles’ 1967 song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Assembling the Pieces

  • Lucy stood 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall, weighed 29 kg (64 lb), and resembled a chimp after restoration. 
  • The creature had a tiny brain like a chimp. Still, the pelvis and leg bones functioned virtually identically to those of contemporary humans, proving that Lucy’s species were hominins who stood upright and walked erect.

Reconstruction in Cleveland

  • With the approval of the Ethiopian government, Johanson transported all of the skeleton parts to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where anthropologist Owen Lovejoy stabilized and rebuilt them. 
  • Lucy, the pre-human hominid and fossil hominin drew much attention; she was practically a household name at the time. She returned to Ethiopia nine years later, now entirely constructed.

Later Discoveries

  • A’s other discoveries of afarensis were made in the 1970s and afterward, providing anthropologists with a more excellent grasp of the ranges of morphic diversity and sexual dimorphism within the species. 
  • A complete skeleton of a similar hominid, Ardipithecus, was discovered in the same Awash Valley in 1992. “Ardi,” like “Lucy,” was a hominin-becoming hominin species, but it developed far earlier than the afarensis species, about 4.4 million years ago. 
  • The excavation, preservation, and study of the specimen Ardi were tough and time-consuming; work began in 1992, but the results were not wholly published until October 2009.

Age Estimates of the Fossil

  • Maurice Taieb and James Aronson attempted to determine the age of the fossils using the potassium-argon radiometric dating technique in Aronson’s laboratory at Case Western Reserve University in 1974. 
  • Several issues hampered these efforts:
  • The rocks in the recovery region had been chemically changed or reworked by volcanic activity.
  • Datable crystals were highly sparse in the sample material.
  • There were no pumice clasts at Hadar. 
  • The Lucy skeleton is found in a portion of the Hadar sequence that accumulated at the quickest rate of deposition, which explains why she is so well preserved.
  • In the winter of 1976-77, fieldwork at Hadar was halted. Derek York at the University of Toronto upgraded the more accurate argon-argon technology when they restarted it thirteen years later, in 1990. By 1992, Aronson and Robert Walter had discovered two appropriate samples of volcanic ash—the older layer of ash was roughly 18 m below the fossil, while the younger layer was barely one meter below, precisely corresponding to the date of deposition of the specimen. 
  • Walter dated these materials using argon-argon in the Institute of Human Origins’ geochronology laboratory at 3.22 and 3.18 million years.

Notable Characteristics

  • Because of Lucy’s modest stature, Johanson reasonably assumed she was a female. He was familiar with previous researchers’ findings of fossil hominins in other regions of Africa decades before the Lucy discovery. 
  • He was aware that, like many living primates, hominins were sexually dimorphic, with males being larger than females; thus, the relatively small bones recovered from A.L.288 appeared to be those of a female.
  • Lucy’s height was later calculated based on the length of her femur, even though the end of her femur had been shattered before complete fossilization.
  • They estimated Lucy’s height to be between 104 and 106 centimeters (cm) tall using mathematical procedures that connect femur length to stature (Feldesman & Lundy, 1988; Jungers, 1988; McHenry, 1991). 
  • Males of Lucy’s species were most likely around 150 cm tall (McHenry, 1991). In 2008, a team of scientists used 3D computer-based technology to recreate Lucy’s injured femur visually and discovered that it was probably only a few millimeters shorter than previously assumed (Sylvester, Merkl, et al., 2008). 
  • Furthermore, Lucy’s bones contain fossil bits that are very similar in appearance.
  • Lucy resembled a cross between an ape and a human, with long dangling arms but pelvis, spine, foot, and leg bones appropriate to walking upright. Slender Lucy was three and a half feet (107 cm) tall. 
  • Recreational activities based on other A. Later discovered afarensis skulls indicate an apelike head with a low and heavy forehead, broadly curved cheekbones, and a protruding jaw—along with a brain around the size of a chimp’s.

Death

  • The cause of death for Lucy has not been established. The specimen shows no indication of postmortem bone injury, typical of animals killed by predators and then scavenged. 
  • The only apparent injury is a single carnivore tooth mark on the top of her left pubic bone, which is thought to have happened at or near the time of her death but is not always tied to her death. 
  • Her third tooth had erupted and was somewhat worn, indicating that she was mature with finished skeletal development.
  • Her vertebrae show degenerative illness that may not necessarily signify old age. When she died, she was thought to be a mature yet young adult. 
  • Lucy died after falling from a lofty tree, according to researchers at the University of Texas in Austin in 2016. Donald Johanson and Tim White were opposed to the recommendations.

Lucy Australopithecus Worksheets

This fantastic bundle includes everything you need to know about Lucy Australopithecus across 23 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Lucy Australopithecus worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Lucy Australopithecus, which is a compilation of several hundred fragments of fossilized bone constituting 40% of a female Australopithecus afarensis. The assemblage is also known as Dinkinesh in Ethiopia, which means “you are magnificent” in Amharic.

Complete List of Included Worksheets

  • Lucy Australopithecus Facts
  • Basics About Lucy
  • Fact Finder
  • Johanson’s Journal
  • Building Vocabulary
  • Rearranging Fossils
  • True or False
  • The Afarensis Species
  • Can’t Be A Reason
  • On Display
  • My Lucy Replica

Frequently Asked Questions 

What is Lucy Australopithecus?

AL 288-1, often known as Lucy, is a compilation of several hundred fragments of fossilized bone constituting 40% of a female Australopithecus afarensis. The assemblage is also known as Dinkinesh in Ethiopia, which means “you are magnificent” in Amharic.

When was the first discovery of Lucy?

Johanson discovered a fossil of the top end of a shinbone that had been cut somewhat at the front in November 1971, near the end of the first field season. When he fitted the lower end of a femur to it, the angle of the knee joint demonstrated that this fossil, reference AL 129-1, was an upright walking hominin. 

How do we know Lucy was a female?

Because of Lucy’s modest stature, Johanson reasonably assumed she was a female. He was familiar with previous researchers’ findings of fossil hominins in other regions of Africa decades before the Lucy discovery.  He was aware that, like many living primates, hominins were sexually dimorphic, with males being larger than females; thus, the relatively small bones recovered from A.L.288 appeared to be those of a female.

What is Lucy’s appearance?

Lucy resembled a cross between an ape and a human, with long dangling arms but pelvis, spine, foot, and leg bones appropriate to walking upright. Slender Lucy was three and a half feet (107 cm) tall. 

Was Lucy a child when she died?

Her vertebrae show degenerative illness that may not necessarily signify old age. When she died, she was thought to be a mature yet young adult. 

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