"We found something extraordinary" : 50 years later, they tell us about the discovery of Lucy
Half a century later, Lucy, the one who was long presented as our universal grandmother, retains her place in the history of Humanity. Raymonde Bonnefille, a scientist specializing in the study of fossil pollen, who was part of the research team deployed in the field in Ethiopia, something rare for a woman at the time, remembers: “I had joined my comrades. They had already been on the ground for more than a month and when I arrived at the entrance to the camp, the American student was jumping for joy, shouting: ‘We found him! We found it!’ And that meant that we hadDidn’t find anything extraordinary. These were the bone fragments that had been spotted.”
This student, of whom Raymonde Bonnefille speaks, is Tom Gray who assists one of the bosses of this excavation site, the American anthropologist Donald Johanson, who has been carrying out research for two years in this area of Afar. In all, 52 fragments were found, assembled and dated. HAS At the time, it is the oldest fossil ever found in what can be considered as the hominid lineage, characterized in particular by this bipedalism which differentiates us from apes.
And then there is this first name, attached to this female skeleton barely more than a meter long, that another participant in the scientific mission, the Frenchman Yves Coppens, will be able to tell so well throughout his career. like here in 2010: “It was initially called ‘AL 288’, it’s not very elegant. And then in the evening we mark fossils so as not to lose them so we put AL 288-1, AL 288-2 with a little touch of varnish on top and while doing that, which is not very funny, we listen to music and the day we found the half-pelvis we said to ourselves that what’s more, it’s a girl. And A.L. 288 became ‘Lucy’ because we were listening to a Beatles tape.”
In 1978, Lucy became the more precise representative of a species, austrolopithecus afarensis, the australopithecus of Afar which was then placed in a direct or almost direct line with us in the human family tree. A sort of grandmother status that has evolved over 50 years. “At the time of her discovery, Lucy is uniqueunderlines Amélie Vialet, paleoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History. It will constitute the fossils which will really allow the definition of a new species of Australopithecus. Today, the family tree has expanded enormously. It is much denser, bushy, filled so it is one among others.
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