Named after The Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ which was playing on a cassette throughout the campsite, the affectionate and usable name of Lucy helps to portray the fact that the remains found are so distinct. With over 40% of the preserved skeleton being found, scientists began to find a real individual emerging.
Lucy was found in Ethiopia’s Afar region by the edge of where a lake would have been. There’s the suggestion that Lucy was pulled into the water by a crocodile. This is based on puncture marks found on the pelvis that were probably made around the time of death.
How do we know Lucy is female?
Based on the length of the thighbone (about 20 cm), Lucy was only 3.5 feet tall. The teeth found in the lower jaw determined that these were the remains of an adult and not a child. Research suggests that the maturation rates in this species were much faster than ours; so despite being 12 years old, Lucy would have been fully developed.
From the diminutive size of the bones, the small canine teeth, and the small stature, Lucy is firmly believed to be female.
What is the significance of Lucy?
One of the most significant features of the discovery of Lucy, is it made scientists re-think ideas of how long our ancestors have been walking upright.
The length of Lucy’s upper arm bones, compared to her thighbones, suggests that she had shorter legs and longer arms than us today. This would naturally lead to the assumption that Lucy’s species would have moved around more like apes. This however was not the case. Even though there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence, it is fair to assume that Lucy did not belong to a highly intelligent species. Lucy’s brain would have been roughly the size of a chimpanzee’s. What shows that Lucy walked more like us today is the pelvis that she possessed.
The similarities between Lucy’s pelvis to the human pelvis suggests she was an upright walker, or at least was favouring this mode of transportation. This pelvic development is one of the first major adaptations that distinguish our ancestors from apes. The freeing of the hands for other uses is a very distinct hallmark for what it means to be placed on the human family tree rather than the ape family tree.
So, although Lucy’s species did not possess overly developed brains, the presence of this species on the planet for over 800,000 years (more than 4 times longer that homo sapiens) shows that they were a species that was successful in different kinds of ways.
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