The Discovery of ‘Lucy’ Fossil: A Milestone in Human Evolution

More than 50 years ago, two anthropologists were digging in Hadar, Ethiopia, when they spotted something glinting in a gully. What they found would transform the story of human evolution. Donald Johanson, then a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was leading an excavation in the Awash Valley because of some millions-of-years-old stone tools that had been found there. He and graduate student Tom Gray had set out early that morning to hunt for fossils. The object they’d spotted turned out to be a fossil of a human ancestor, and when they looked around the site, they found others from the same individual.