WCIV 10100-H
Dr. LePree
Fall 2016
Lucy; the most important discovery of the 20th Century Ever since discussions of human ancestry began, many people believed that Europe was the home of the first ancestors of humankind up until the end of the 20th century. An American paleoanthropologist by the name of Dr. Donald Carl Johanson, visited Ethiopia as part of the International Afar Research Expedition in 1973, as a result of this expedition, Dr. Johanson found a knee of a hominid that turned out to be about 3 million years old. Because of its size and the shape, he concluded that this knee belonged to an individual who was bipedal; a species that walks on two legs. A year after his first finding, Johanson went back to Ethiopia with his own expedition team to find what will later be called, Lucy, the Australopithecus Afarensis. Lucy turned out to be one of the oldest human ancestor at the time. At first Lucy’s skeleton looked like an ape’s …show more content…
It marked the spot in my notebook and gave it a locality number. As I was writing that down, I noticed another piece of bone a few yards away. This was a distal femur—the lower end of a thighbone—also very small. This was a split up the middle so that only one its condyles, or bony bumps that fitted into the shinbone to make a knee joint, was attached.” (Johanson, Edey pg. 155)
In addition to Johanson’s analysis, Owen Lovejoy greatly contributed to the analysis of the 1973 knee joint. Lovejoy, a forensic scientist and professor of anthropology at Kent University (Jstor.org), helped Dr. Johanson decipher the mystery of the knee, and also later found pelvis. Dr. Lovejoy concluded that it was a human knee because all the characteristics that it had which could only belong to species that was