Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone representing about 40% of the skeleton of a female Australopithecus afarensis. In Ethiopia it is also known as Dinkinesh which means “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language. It was discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia. In paleoanthropology, usually only fossil fragments are found and only rarely are skulls or ribs uncovered intact; thus this discovery was extraordinary and provided an enormous amount of scientific evidence.
Lucy was 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall,weighed 29 kg (64 lb), and (by reconstruction) looked somewhat like a chimpanzee. Although the creature had a small brain, the pelvis and leg bones were almost identical in function to those of modern humans, showing with certainty that these hominids had walked erect.
Lucy’s cause of death is not known. She does not show the signs of post-mortem bone damage characteristic of animals killed by predators and then scavenged. The only visible damage to Lucy’s bones is a single carnivore tooth puncture mark on the top of her left pubic bone, believed to have occurred at or around the time of death, that may not be related to her death. Her erupted and slightly worn third molars and the development of her bones indicate that she was fully adult with completed skeletal development. There are indications of degenerative disease to her vertebrae, but this is not necessarily an indicator of old age. It is believed that she was a mature, but young, adult when she died.
Lucy replica side view