Lucy, the Iconic Ancestor
Fifty years since the discovery of Lucy, what does this iconic fossil tell us about our evolutionary story?
By Evan HadinghamAuthor of Discovering Us
What marked out our ancestors from other early apes and set them on the evolutionary path to becoming Homo sapiens? At the start of the 20th century, many assumed that intelligence and a big brain were
Lucy, discovered 50 years ago in Ethiopia, stood just 3.5 feet tall − but she still towers over our understanding of human origins
In 1974, on a survey in Hadar in the remote badlands of Ethiopia, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray found a piece of an elbow joint jutting from the dirt in a gully. It proved to be the first of 47 bones of a single individual – an early human ancestor whom Johanson nicknamed “Lucy.”
Underwater caves yield new clues about Sicily’s first residents
How and when did people first come to Sicily? Scientists exploring coastal and underwater caves discover clues about Sicily's first settlers.
The Origins of the Stonehenge Altar Stone
New research in Nature solves the mystery of the origins of the Stonehenge Altar Stone, an enigmatic rock at the heart of the monument.
The extinction of the giant ape: A long-standing mystery solved
Giant creatures are usually associated with dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, or mystical beasts. But if you go back through the human lineage you’ll find a very distant relative that stood three metres tall and weighed around 250 kilograms. This was Gigantopithecus blacki, the mightiest of all the primates and one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in paleontology.