When contemporary humans turn 50, some try to convince you they’re actually 35, giveor-take, until you see the white roots at the base of dyed hair. Well, Lucy turns 50 this year, but she’s actually 3.2 million years old—and proud of it!
Australopithecus afarensis was discovered in November 1974 by Don Johanson at Hadar in Ethiopia. She was dubbed Lucy because the paleoanthropologists blared the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” while celebrating with beer the night of the find.
Per the cover story of a recent issue of the journal Science, the diminutive 3-foot-tall Lucy was hailed as the “mother of us all,” the earliest known ancestor to the human family. Some 50 years later, she no longer retains that title. More recent finds of ever older hominins go back as far as 6 million years, and it appears that there was a burst of evolutionary adaptation, with a number of hominins coexisting millions of years ago, any one of which could conceivably be our direct ancestor. But of all the finds made to date, Lucy remains the most iconic, well deserving of her place up in the sky with diamonds on this, her golden anniversary.