SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Fifty years ago this weekend, there was a team of archaeologists digging in Ethiopia, looking for early fossils of human ancestors. After an uneventful morning, Donald Johanson walked back to his Land Rover and glanced over his right shoulder.
DONALD JOHANSON: Had I glanced over my left shoulder, I would've missed this little piece of arm bone. It had eroded out of beach sand. It was just out on the surface.
SIMON: The team carefully excavated major parts of a skeleton that turned out to be 3 million years old.
JOHANSON: Fragments of hands and feet, upper limbs, lower limbs, and we had a little party going on in camp that evening.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS")
THE BEATLES: (Singing) Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
SIMON: Dr. Johanson was a Beatles fan. So he put on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Another member of the group shouted out, they ought to call their ancient find Lucy. And in the half-century since, Lucy has become one of the most famous skeletons ever discovered - a key link to trace human ancestry back a million years earlier than was then known.
JOHANSON: And I thought, Oh my goodness, I've just finished my doctorate at the University of Chicago, and I don't know if I want to give her a cute little name, but it was too late. In the morning at breakfast, people were saying, are we going back to the Lucy site? That's how she got her name.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS")
THE BEATLES: (Singing) Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
SIMON: How did you know that the skeleton you'd found had been that of a woman?
JOHANSON: Well, it was based primarily on size. These fragments of the skeleton were very small. The immediate thought was, is it perhaps a child? The length of her thigh bone, for example, is only about 12 inches long. So it meant she was only about 3 1/2 feet tall. But looking at the jaw itself with the teeth in it, we could see that the wisdom teeth had erupted so that biologically, she had stopped growing.
SIMON: How did Lucy change what we always thought we knew about human evolution?
JOHANSON: Well, we have to look back to those early days in the 1970s when it was widely thought in the anthropological community that the fossils from South Africa found way back in 1924 were the common ancestor to all the later branches on the human family tree. After studying Lucy for four years, she was announced in 1978 as a new zoological species. We called her Australopithecus afarensis after the area, the Afar Triangle, where we were working, and postulated that this was the last common ancestor to all the later branches. So she really redrew the geometry of the human family tree.
SIMON: Dr. Johanson, what do we learn about ourselves when we learn about someone like Lucy?
JOHANSON: One of the most important things we've learned from our studies of early human ancestors is the roots of all humankind lie in Africa. No matter where we grasp a branch on the human family tree, whether it's with Neanderthals or Homo erectus Peking and Java Man or ourselves, we can trace the origins back to Africa, which was really the crucible where humans were crafted. Humankind today, no matter where we live on this planet, all have a common beginning, a common origin. Europe was not the finishing school for humanity, but Africa played an enormous role in making us who we are today.
SIMON: Do you get birthday cards for Lucy this time of year?
JOHANSON: Well, I do. I often get them from sixth-graders who study Lucy and jointly come together and write a card and wish Lucy a happy birthday. Interestingly, we had - a sixth-grader asked, if Professor Johanson is still alive, was Lucy married? It was an interesting question, but it is of enormous fascination to elementary school kids.
SIMON: Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, founding director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and the man who found Lucy. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
JOHANSON: Well, it's been a pleasure. I'm a great fan of your show, and I appreciate being on your program.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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