Lucy's discovery took place in the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia. Donald Johanson, an American anthropologist, and the student who accompanied him, Tom Gray, spotted a piece of elbow, likely to have belonged to a hominid. A few days later, the analysis of these pre-human remains was clear: it was a woman. She lived 3.2 million years BCE.
Teeth, vertebrae, fragments of pelvis, femur, tibia, but also arm bones such as the humerus, radius and ulna: these are indeed among the abundance of bones discovered during an expedition co-led by Donald Johansson, Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb that lies the exceptional nature of the discovery. All belong to a single fossil recorded under the scientific number AL 288-1, for the 288th locality explored on the right bank of the Awash River, Ethiopia.
They are very quickly collected, assembled and thanks to the symmetry of the skeleton, a fairly precise silhouette emerges. The fragments of the pelvis allow scientists to establish that it is a female subject. It is renamed Lucy, a nod to the Beatles song “ Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds » in the ears of all the members of the scientific expedition.
Another certainty: whether in Africa, France or the United States, everyone knows Lucy, an eminent member of an international collective history. Exhibited in many museums around the world in the form of replicas, his original bones remain well guarded, in a safe, in his country of origin, Ethiopia.
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