Lucy Was Discovered 50 Years Ago. What’s Changed from 1974 to Now?

[A photograph of tents near an oasis in an arid, mountainous landscape. On-screen text reads “Hadar, Ethiopia, 1974.” A series of subsequent photographs show a team walking across this landscape, brushing dirt from a fossil, and laying fossils out on a table.]

IAN TATTERSALL: When Lucy was discovered back in 1974, she was by far the most complete as well as the most ancient human precursor that was known in the fossil record. Lucy was really an entirely new window into the more ancient past than had been known previously.

ASHLEY HAMMOND: Everyone's heard of Lucy. Lucy is a household name at this point.

[A photograph from the 1970s of the pieces of Lucy’s skeleton arranged in place on a table.]

HAMMOND: And while many of us know her as Lucy, in Ethiopia they know her as Dinknesh, which means “you are marvelous” in Amharic, which is one of the major languages in Ethiopia.

[A photograph from the 1970s of Donald C. Johanson, who discovered Lucy, standing with the skeleton and wearing a suit.]

ROB DESALLE: Lucy's cool.

[A series of shots of academic publications being opened to pages that show a picture of Lucy’s skeleton.]

DESALLE: And Lucy has also become a linchpin, a major player, in how we interpret the evolution of our lineage.

[A shot of the entrance to the modern-day Spitzer Hall of Human Origins in the Museum.]

TATTERSALL: So the picture we have today of human evolution is very, very different from the picture that we had when Lucy was discovered.

[Black-and-white photographs of the Museum’s old displays on human evolution circa the 1960s appear on top of each other like a collage.]

TATTERSALL: It's been 50 years now. And a lot has changed in that time.

[A series of shots of modern-day technology, including 3D scans of fossils and Museum scientists working with DNA.]

TATTERSALL: And it would be hubris to assume that in 50 years’ time, things won't have changed at least as much as they have since we discovered Lucy.

[The Museum LOGO appears over a closeup shot of the cast of Lucy on display at the Museum.]

[Ian Tattersall speaks in a seated interview in a room filled with casts of fossils and models of hominid ancestors.]

IAN TATTERSALL (CURATOR EMERITUS, DIVISION OF ANTHROPOLOGY): Lucy is a name that we informally give to a very well-preserved skeleton of a very ancient human precursor who lived and died in Ethiopia at about 3.2 million years ago.

[Museum visitors to the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins admire the cast of Lucy on display—an exact replica of the original fossils arranged anatomically.]

ASHLEY HAMMOND (ASSOCIATE CURATOR, DIVISION OF ANTHROPOLOGY): Here at the Museum, we’re lucky enough to have a cast of Lucy on display in the Hall of Human Origins.

[The camera pushes in on a cast of the skull of an Australopithecus afarensis as part of a hominid evolution chart.]

HAMMOND: Lucy is from a species called Australopithecus afarensis.

[A satellite map of Africa with no political borders appears.]

HAMMOND: This is a species really well known throughout Eastern Africa.

[The region of Eastern Africa is highlighted, which spans from Eritrea in the north through Mozambique in the south, and west from South Sudan and Zambia east to the island nation of Mauritius past Madagascar.]

HAMMOND: At least from Tanzania up through Ethiopia.

[The borders of Tanzania and Ethiopia appear over a satellite map of Africa.]

HAMMOND: Australopithecus, the genus, precedes our own genus, genus Homo.

[A Museum display called “Our Family Tree” shows the evolutionary relationships between hominid genera, including Australopithecus and Homo. While these two groups seem to connect to one another there is not a clear link between the two through a particular species.]

HAMMOND: So there's an assumption that genus Australopithecus probably evolved into genus Homo at some point, but we don't know for sure.

[Footage of the cast of Lucy on display at the Museum, including close-ups of the rib cage, pelvis, and knee.]

HAMMOND: Lucy was 40% complete, she had elements from all different regions of her body.

We didn't really know what Australopithecus looked like below the neck. And Lucy changed that.

Lucy had a knee that was positioned under the midline of her body. So that's a really important feature for being an efficient biped.

[A 3D illustration of Lucy’s complete skeleton appears in the middle of a 3D illustration of a chimpanzee and modern human skeleton. Lucy’s body structure is more similar to that of the modern human since both have thigh bones that angle in towards the knees, whereas the chimpanzee’s legs are more out to the side.]

HAMMOND: And she has really told us a lot about the origins of bipedality, upright walking.

Lucy is only about three and a half feet tall fully grown, and that's about the size of your average kindergartener.

[A child stands in front of the cast of Lucy on display at the Museum. They are similar in height.]

HAMMOND: Lucy's species had a fairly small brain size, so the size of a large orange, more or less, which is what we see in chimpanzees. But she was already bipedal.

[An artist’s imagining of several Australopithecus afarensis individuals walking upright through the Laetoli prehistoric site where fossilized footprints have been discovered.]

HAMMOND: So Lucy’s species showed us that big brains came much later in human evolution.

[A closeup of the pelvis of the Lucy cast on display in the Museum.]

Lucy's pelvis and hip bones have been really influential for my work.

[A photograph of Hammond posing with the original Lucy fossils laid out in trays at the National Museum of Ethiopia.]

The first time that I studied Lucy's bones, it was really an incredible moment in my career as a paleoanthropologist. Because it's almost like meeting a rock star. Lucy is an icon.

[Tattersall speaks in a seated interview.]

TATTERSALL: It's a very powerful experience and a great privilege to be able to actually handle and study these unique specimens.

[A photograph of the exterior of the National Museum of Ethiopia.]

TATTERSALL: And Lucy, for example, lives in a vault in the National Museum in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

[A close-up photograph of the original Lucy fossils in a tray. A photograph of school children examining a cast of Lucy’s skeleton at the National Museum of Ethiopia.]

TATTERSALL: She's part of the world patrimony, but she also belongs to the Ethiopian people. And they have to take good care of her security. So she's in a vault where she can be studied by scientists.

[A photograph of a cast of Lucy’s skeleton, articulated with metal wiring taking the place of the missing fossils, is accompanied by the text, “Cast of ‘Lucy’ in Frankfurt, Germany.”]

TATTERSALL: Casts are absolutely vital to be able to present fossils to a world audience.

[A similarly articulated cast is identified as being located in Mexico City, followed by another cast identified as being in Cleveland, Ohio.]

TATTERSALL: A cast is an exact replica of a fossil of any kind.

[A series of shots of visitors looking at casts of fossils in the Museum’s Hall of Human Origins, including that of a Neanderthal and Homo floresiensis.] 

TATTERSALL: For all intents and purposes, you are looking at the original when you're looking at a cast in a museum exhibit.

[A side-angle view of a visitor looking at the cast of Lucy, showing how a visitor could walk around the display to see every angle of it.]

TATTERSALL: And you're seeing it in three dimensions. And you cannot get quite the same impact from even a very wonderful photograph.

[A photograph of the Museum’s cast of Lucy on display in the Museum’s former Hall of Human Biology, taken in 1993.]

TATTERSALL: It was obviously very important for us to have Lucy represented in our exhibit on human evolution.

[In her office, Hammond carries a tray of casts of Lucy’s fossils to a table and examines the jawbone.]

TATTERSALL: It also was very important to have a chance to look at it in three dimensions ourselves as scientists in the laboratories of the museum.

[Hammond and an assistant sit at a computer analyzing 3D scans of a fossil.]

HAMMOND: Technology has really come a long way in this field since 1974.

[A series of shots showing recent technology: a bone being 3D scanned, close-up of a CT scanner, a scientist placing a sample into a large electron-scanning microscope, a technician in a white “clean suit,” hairnet, and mask uses a pipette to fill a tube.]

HAMMOND: The possibilities for how we can analyze fossils like Lucy have really exploded with the advent of things like micro-CT scanning, isotopic analyses, and ancient DNA.

[Rob DeSalle speaks in a seated interview in a DNA lab at the Museum.]

ROB DESALLE (CURATOR AND PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, INSTITUTE FOR COMPARITIVE GENOMICS): DNA carries the information for us to reconstruct the history of how organisms have diverged.

We have just recently within the last 10 years started to get DNA sequences from extinct hominids, that is the Neanderthal and the Denisovans. And these DNA sequences are really helpful in — in getting us to understand how our species, Sapiens, diverged from the other hominid species. And from other great apes.

When Lucy was found, what, 50 years ago, the technology was nowhere near what it is now.

The real limitation is whether or not you can find fossils with DNA in them.

[ A photograph of one of Lucy’s fossils being excavated. A photograph of all the discovered pieces of Lucy’s skeleton.]

DeSalle: Fossils like Lucy are heavily mineralized, which means that all of the organic material like DNA has been replaced with minerals.

And usually fossils that are older than, say, 100,000 years, certainly older than half a million or a million years, are going to carry very little, if any DNA. So this restricts us from getting the genomes of really old fossils like Lucy, who's three million years old.

[A series of shots of two scientists in white clean suits, hair nets, and masks working with DNA and protein samples using several machines. Text on screen reads, “Ancient Biomolecular Lab, American Museum of Natural History, New York.”]

DeSalle: The kinds of techniques that could open new doors in the study of human evolution don't involve using DNA. They involve using proteins that the DNA codes for. And it's been shown recently that proteins actually stick around in fossils a lot longer than DNA does. So that — proteins may be a lot easier to work with from fossil remains than, say, DNA.

[A sped-up shot of many visitors examining the Lucy cast on display in the Museum’s Hall of Human Origins, followed by several shots of visitors looking at Lucy and various other casts and displays.]

HAMMOND: I think one of Lucy's biggest contributions has been not just to science, but to public understanding of human evolution. Lucy became a household name after her discovery. And she continues to just live in the imaginations of people when they come to the museum and see her on exhibit.

TATTERSALL: What has really been wonderful is the sort of serendipity with which new discoveries in paleoanthropology have been made. And I think what's the most exciting thing as we contemplate the future is the element of surprise. And I'm looking forward to that.

[CREDITS.]