Lucy: media stars 50 years
Ethiopia, 24 November 1974. Lucy's skeleton was found in Hadar, one of the oldest traces of human ancestors. The Australian hominid of Australopithecus afarensis is between 3.2 and 3.5 million years old.
So they considered it the ancestor of species, the mother of all of us. In this half-century, more than 400 remains of the species Australopithecus afarensis have been found. Thanks to these studies and Lucy's, we now know a lot more about the characteristics of the species. But there are still many unanswered questions that question whether Lucy was hominid: Was he able to make tools and use them?
And in these 50 years, Lucy has also had to deal with Lucy. Other older species have been found: Ardipithecus ramidus, Ardipithecus kadabba, Orrorin tugenensis and Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Lucy was the first to overcome the barrier of 3 million years, but with these species we would reach 6-7 million years. Of course, it's much harder to say that these species were hominids.
And Lucy's biggest competition is other contemporary species. “At the same time we have many other species,” says Yohannes Haile Selassie, director of the Institute of Human Origins (IHO) at Arizona State University. “The human family looked more shrub than a bonsai, with many outbreaks growing in front of each other, rather than being a single trunk.”
Lucy has had an excellent marketing campaign over half a century, and it cannot be denied that these are high-value traces (...) But that does not mean that Homo is the ancestor of all species and that other candidates should be allowed in the hypotheses.
For example, in 1999, on the shore of Lake Turkana, the Kenyanthropus platyops skull was located, 3.5 million years old, and in 2016 the first full skull of Australopithecus anamensis was discovered, 3.8 million years ago.
But Lucy was a media star from the very beginning, and other signs have remained in its shadow. Lucy's name is because they were listening to the song Lucy in the sky with diamonds from The Beatles when the finding was discovered. Turned into a pop icon, he has carried out long tours around the world, including the one that took place in the United States in 2006, for the concern of the experts. In 2015, then-President of the United States, Barack Obama, enjoyed an absurd privilege of touching the bones. Don Johansson, who discovered the clues, has recently visited Ethiopia, and young amateurs have asked selfis for the 80-year-old archaeologist…
Lucy has had an excellent marketing campaign over half a century, and it cannot be denied that these are high-value traces, especially because 40% of the entire skeleton has been saved and because “it is the most analyzed fossil in the world,” according to IHO member Kaye Reed. That does not mean, however, that Homo is the ancestor of all species, and other candidates must be given room in the hypotheses. According to Washington University paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood, “Lucy is still the best candidate.”
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