Whenever people find new fossils, especially paleoanthropologist, they get excited and want to look for more to know about the mysterious history of life on earth. Finally, in November 30, 1974, one lucky paleoanthropologist, Donald Johanson and his co-worker Tom Gray found my fossil at Hadar, Ethiopia. From now on people could know that I existed once on this earth a long time ago. I say lucky, because my body was covered by tons of volcanic ash and mud for millions of years, but Hadar’s long rain washed off the dust from my body. That kind of rain does not often happen in Hadar. I was a new species of Australopithecus afarensis and extinct hominid that lived between 3.9 and 2.9 million years ago. Donald Johanson and his co-workers were very happy and did not sleep that night. They had been playing the Beatle’s song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds over and over again at their camp. So I had been named Lucy and gave more insight to the evolution of humans and apes.
The scientists are not really sure about what I was; human or ape. I had a low forehead, a bony ridge over the eyes, a flat nose, no chin, more humanlike teeth, pelvis and leg bones that resembled those of modern man. My body was smaller than my male friends and the relationship of sexual dimorphism and social group structure was like a modern ape. My father had a number of wives and lived in family groups. It was not like then gorillas; more sexually dimorphic than humans or chimpanzees. Scientists assume I lost of an abductable great toe and the ability to grasp with the foot and was no longer adapted to climbing. My fingers and toe bones were curved and longer than the modern human. I am classified as an ape, not a human. It is a Hominid, which is an ape closely related to human beings.
My body size, brain size and skull shape is similar to a chimpanzee but I also have some human characteristics like the way my hip joint and pelvis a connected. I walked upright like a human, not like a chimp. About 10 million years ago, climate changed and it affected forests in East and Central Africa. During these times ancestral hominids could have adapted the upright walking behavior for ground travel, while the ancestors of gorillas and chimpanzees became more specialized in climbing vertical tree trunks or lianas, with a bent hip and bent knee posture to use the related knuckle-walking posture for ground travel. It might be that I used an upright bipedalism for ground travel, while still having arms that make me well adapted for climbing smaller trees. I was efficiently bipedal walker in short distances because the footprints at Laetoli indicate we were walking at 1.0 m/s or more, that speed is really slow. This can be questioned, as finds of Australopithecus foot bones indicate the Laetoli footprints may not have been made by Australopithecus. Many scientists also doubt the suggestion of bipedalism, and questioning if we really did walk on two legs, it did not walk in the same way as humans. They also think I might sleep in the trees because non-human primates sleep in the trees. The large premolars of mine suggest we were frugivores and we may have eaten nuts, grains, or hard fruit pies by having the thick enamel on the teeth.
All the Australopithecus went extinct by about 1 million years ago. We may have vanished as a result of global climate cooling or the Australopithecus may have been pressed to extinction by the growing populations of early humans. I was one of the first hominids to diverge from the species of apes and on toward the evolution of the human species because of our intermediate position in our characteristics. I can be differentiated as one of the first steps on the human evolutionary ladder from ape to human. That was the last day of my life being alive on the ground and I had been buried under the mud and ash for millions of years.