In 1974, paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray, digging in Hadar, Ethiopia, found the partial skeleton of the earliest known hominid at the time—a female they called Lucy ...

What was the crucial change that set us on the path to becoming human? Our big brains, with their capacity for language and making complex tools, set us apart from other animals. Our ability to ...

The fossilised skeleton of the 1.1-metre-tall (3.6 feet), 29-kilogramme (64-pound) Lucy last left Ethiopia between 2007 and 2013 when it toured US museums. The hominid was named after the Beatles ...

The team first scanned Lucy’s bones, which represent about 40 percent of her complete skeleton, using X-ray computed tomography. The technique allowed them to peer deep into the fossils, and trace the ...

The only known hominid fossils of that age in that location are those of Lucy and her kind, the small-brained but upright-walking hominids classified as Australopithecus afarensis. Some analysts ...