On June 24, 2024, La Poste will issue a stamp to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of Lucy's bones.
In the 1970s, the discovery of Lucy's bones on the banks of the Awash River in Ethiopia irreparably changed our vision and knowledge of the origins of the human species.
It all happened on November 24, 1974, when several members of the International Afar Research Expedition uncovered a few isolated fossil bones emerging from the wall. The clearance continues, involving the directors of the mission (the geologist Maurice Taieb and the paleo-anthropologist Donald Johanson), the paleontologists Claude Guillemot and Yves Coppens, as well as Ethiopian students and researchers: the whole is preciously collected under the number scientific reference AL 288-1.
It will take two years to publish this discovery in the prestigious journal Nature (1976), and two more years to give it the name of a new species (Australopithecus afarensis) and a precise dating: 3.18 million years. Since then, other fossils have been discovered, but less well preserved (52 bone fragments are preserved for Lucy, or 40% of the entire skeleton!): isolated mandible, child skeleton, cranial elements, etc.
It is from Lucy that the antiquity of bipedalism (even partial) could be demonstrated, well before the appearance of the process of increasing brain volume. Its bone density, the morphology of its hips and knees, and the opening of its pelvis show an individual sharing simian and human traits: a subject of approximately 25 years old, 1.10 m in height, and less than 30 kg.
We all know the anecdote widely reported by Yves Coppens – “Lucy’s dad”, who died on June 22, 2022 –: it was while listening, on the excavation site, to the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” that the idea came to the discoverers to name it that way. But its name in Amharic – the natural language of Ethiopia – is even more loaded with meaning: Dinqnesh (“you are wonderful”). How judicious this baptismal name now appears...
