At some point during that night, no one remembers when or by whom, the skeleton was given the name “Lucy.” The name has stuck.īack to top How do we know she was a hominid? There was drinking, dancing, and singing the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was playing over and over. Later in the night of November 24, there was much celebration and excitement over the discovery of what looked like a fairly complete hominid skeleton. Two weeks later, after many hours of excavation, screening, and sorting, several hundred fragments of bone had been recovered, representing 40 percent of a single hominid skeleton. Shortly thereafter, he saw an occipital (skull) bone, then a femur, some ribs, a pelvis, and the lower jaw. Within moments, he spotted a right proximal ulna (forearm bone) and quickly identified it as a hominid. Johanson suggested taking an alternate route back to the Land Rover, through a nearby gully. After a long, hot morning of mapping and surveying for fossils, they decided to head back to the vehicle. They had taken a Land Rover out that day to map in another locality.

Lucy was found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray on November 24, 1974, at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia. How do we know that her skeleton is a single individual?.

Chimpanzee skeleton