On a sunny Sunday morning along the Awash River in the small Ethiopian town of Hadar, a newly minted Ph.D. from the University of Chicago uncovered a fossil-rich site that would redefine human history.
Fossil hunting in the area was no accident — elephant, pig, rhino and antelope remains were abundant. Driven by optimism, he says he hoped to uncover something extraordinary: a human ancestor fossil.
“I looked over my right shoulder, I saw a little fragment of bone, and I recognized it as coming from one of the bones in the arm, the bone that allows us to flex and extend our arm,” scientist Donald Johanson recalled.
“I looked at it. I thought at first maybe it was a baboon," he said. "It was very tiny. As I examined it more closely, I could see the anatomy was the anatomy of a human ancestor … and as I looked around, I found fragments of a skull, fragments of a jaw, and it was part of a skeleton.”
Johanson, along with graduate student Tom Gray, had made one of the most important findings in paleontology, discovering a 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor fossil, about 40% complete. That was 50 years ago.
The discovery of Lucy, or “Dinknesh” as the remains are locally known, changed not just Johanson’s career but it also shed new light on how humans evolved and changed over time, according to Johanson, who became a founding director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
“She and many of the fossils we found tell us that all humans on the planet came from Africa, that Africa is the homeland for humanity, and that we have a common past, no matter the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, the texture of our hair. We carry the genes of Africa in all of us,” Johanson told VOA's Horn of Africa Service, reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of iconic Lucy on Nov. 24, 1974.
“We should be thinking about a common future for the species Homo sapiens that we have become today,” he said.
The discovery attracted scientists from around the world to the region, spurring extensive research and inspiring Ethiopian scientists to make significant findings of their own.
Among them is Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago, who said Lucy is the earliest and most complete human ancestor fossil ever uncovered.
The discovery “literally transformed our knowledge of human evolution,” he said.
“At that point, the earliest humans, meaning apart walking creatures, were considered to have lived 2 million years ago, but with the discovery of Lucy, that number changed by a whopping 1 million years,” Zeresenay said.
“Lucy continues to serve us as a benchmark, as a reference point for discoveries. So, her influence and impact was huge,” he said.
While completing his studies in Addis Ababa, Zeresenay was assigned to the National Museum of Ethiopia, home to Lucy's fossil. This opportunity allowed him to study a wealth of discoveries made by scientists from around the globe, including Johanson.
In 2000, Zeresenay made his own discovery, a fossil that was over 60% complete, which lived 150,000 years before Lucy. The fossilized remains, called Selam, were from a child who died at the age of 2-1/2 or 3, which Zeresenay said is a very rare occurrence.
“In terms of discovery, most of the fossils that we find come from adult individuals, so in many ways, she represents the earliest and most complete child ever discovered in the history of paleoanthropology,” he told VOA.
“Her contribution to the scientific community is that she fills in a major gap that continues to puzzle us because we don't normally discover juvenile individuals, young individuals, infants, much less a complete skeleton of an infant.”
Zeresenay explained that the discoveries of Lucy and Selam have been instrumental in public outreach efforts for Ethiopia. Selam was uncovered in 2000 in Dikika, in the Afar region of the country.
“Even the new motto of the Tourism Commission in Ethiopia — 'The land of Origins' — was coined by me,” he said.
“I, of course, leaned on both Selam and Lucy, but many other discoveries, to show that the country is the land of origins — the cradle of mankind — and also the origin of many things, including the Nile, coffee, et cetera.”
The discovery of Selam was made in a dangerous area contested by rival clans of Afar and Issa ethnic groups where land disputes lead to deadly violence among neighboring communities. Zeresenay named his fossil Selam — or "Peace," in Amharic, Tigrigna and Arabic — which was proposed by museum visitors who viewed the fossil. He said he hoped there would be peace in the area of the discovery as Ethiopian Afar and Issa communities continue to clash over land disputes.
“If we see so much misery and problems in Africa and other parts of the world, it's really for lack of having a good understanding, a scientific understanding, a technological understanding of what is around us,” Zeresenay said.
“So I would urge our young population to be keen about science and technology.”
This story originated in VOA's Horn of Africa Service.
