Ethiopia: 50 years after her discovery, Lucy has not yet revealed all her secrets

The four boxes were carefully removed from a safe and placed on a long table. Inside, dental remains, fragments of skull, pelvis and femur of the most famous Australopithecus, Lucy, discovered fifty years ago in Ethiopia.

On November 24, 1974, in the Afar region nestled in the northeast of the country, a team of scientists initially formed by Maurice Taieb, Yves Coppens, Donald Johanson, Jon Kalb and Raymonde Bonnefille, unearthed 52 fragments of bones, making up approximately 40% of the skeleton.

This bipedal hominid fossil, at the time the most complete ever found, will revolutionize scientific research and the understanding of our ancestors.

First called AL-288-1, researchers later nicknamed it Lucy, in reference to the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, which the team listened to after celebrating the discovery.

This is an Australopithecus afarensis, 3.18 million years old.

– “Our own origins” –

Lucy, who died possibly between 11 and 13 years old (which is considered an adult age for this species) measuring 1.10 m tall and weighing 29 kg, is kept in a room not open to the public at the National Museum of Ethiopia, in the heart of the capital Addis Ababa.

For Sahleselasie Melaku, who heads the paleontology department, Lucy changed “the perception of human evolution”.

He considers the period before his discovery to be “a dark period” of scientific research. “Since its discovery, we have learned a lot about our own origins,” says the 31-year-old scientist.

The museum still receives numerous requests to study it, but the skeleton no longer leaves Ethiopia.

Sahleselasie Melaku is still amazed by its preservation. In particular, he points to a slightly deformed vertebra. “That means she probably had back problems,” he emphasizes.

“The discovery of Lucy was quite an exceptional moment because we have to realize that 50 years ago, we ultimately knew very little before 3 million years and we had nothing as complete”, remarks Jean-Renaud Boisserie, paleontologist, research director at the CNRS, assigned to the French Center for Ethiopian Studies.

– “Driving role” –

Long described as “the grandmother of Humanity”, Lucy is today considered more like an aunt or a cousin – her direct lineage with Man being disputed.

Because since 1974, numerous discoveries have reshuffled the cards, with specimens unearthed in Ethiopia, South Africa, Kenya but also in Chad, with “Toumaï” discovered in 2001 which dates back around 7 million years. . He is considered by some scientists to be the first representative of the human lineage.

Always studied, Lucy has not yet revealed all her secrets.

According to a study published in 2016, it spent a third of its time in trees, where it nested, and had very developed upper limbs.

She died after falling from a tree, according to a study in the American journal PLOS One the same year.

In 2022, another study published in the journal The Nature and focusing in particular on Lucy’s pelvis, concluded that newborn australopithecines had a very immature brain, like current newborns, and required the cooperation of the parents to take care of them.

“There are still many unanswered questions,” smiles Sahleselasie Melaku, before continuing: “In particular, we do not know much more about the childhood of these ancestors.”

For the paleontologist, scientific progress and increasingly advanced equipment allow for further understanding.

“The studies that can be carried out on it, on its peers, pose the scientific questions of tomorrow”, underlines Jean-Renaud Boisserie: “Material as exceptional as this has a driving role in the evolution of research”.

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