ABSTRACT
The first Hadar field season in 1975 witnessed a line of National Science Foundation research tents camped in the center of the Afar desert overlooking the dry beds of the Awash River in Ethiopia. A young paleoanthropologist, Donald Johanson, on his first expedition, was wondering what would happen if he failed to find the fossils he had written about in his grant application. Out surveying late one afternoon, Johanson describes kicking at what looked like a hippo rib sticking up out of the ground. On closer examination it appeared to be the bone of a small primate. As he wrote down in his notebook the detailed location, he spotted two other pieces of bone nearby; the rest is history. These bones placed together by Johanson fitted at a surprising angle. They were the femur and tibia of an upright walker and part of an amazing early hominid skeleton, nearly 40 percent complete, that the archaeological team went on to locate. They had identified the remarkable remains of a single female individual of a new species, Australopithecus afarensis. The camp rocked with excitement as its members began to realize how significant the finds of an upright-walking 3-millionyear-old female hominid were. As they celebrated, a Beatles tape played on a cassette recorder: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” They affectionately called the fossil “Lucy.”
