And this is how Lucy tells a story

In fact, it was an cyst—the long and thin bone of both in your forearm. Looking around, they found a femur (thigh bone), a pelvis, a skull bone and more. Obviously, this got the two young scientists very excited, so they returned to the spot to hunt for more bones. Over the next two weeks, they extracted a few hundred bone fragments from the soil from the entire body of that ancestor. In fact, put together, the fragments make up about 40% of a hominid’s skeleton—an early human or one of our ape-like ancestors, which is their ability to walk upright on two legs (“bipedalism”). feature of.

The story goes that that night of the first discovery in their field quarters, the scientists celebrated with a grand party. someone played the beatles classic Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds—and somehow the name sounded right. The skeleton was named Lucy, and is one of the most famous hominid discoveries ever made.

This week, there’s another scientific effort that’s a tribute to this ancient Lucy—you can even say Lucy in the sky. But before we get to that, a little more about Lucy in the Ethiopian Plain.

You might be surprised: we only have those bone fragments, some relatively complete, some pretty much indistinguishable from small pebbles. Once excavated, the pieces were placed in the positions they would have occupied when Lucy was alive, and the result clearly looks like a human skeleton. Even so, it is just 40% of the skeleton. How do Johansson and her colleagues get so much out of it?

Perhaps the first of many questions to ask about these bones: is it really just the skeleton of a creature? Isn’t it possible that the bones are from many hominids? Well, it’s not likely to be the best. If Johansson and Gray had found, for example, two jaw bones, it would have been evidence that there were two or more individual skeletons buried in the soil. But there was only one jaw bone, and every other bone they found there was equally unique. In all those pieces, there are no duplicates. So these bones belong to Lucy and no one else.

If it’s confirmed, why “Lucy”? Meaning, why are we sure it was a woman’s skeleton? Hominids have external markers to differentiate between sexes, no doubt, but what is it in these bones that gives away its gender? Strictly speaking, nothing is specific in bones. But from Hadr and other sites in East Africa, we now have the remains of more than 300 individuals. They clearly belong to a genus called Australopithecus afarensis (“the southern apes from Afar in Ethiopia”) that lived between 3.9 million. And 2.8 million years ago—much longer than us—specimens of Homo sapiens populated the Earth.

Now 300 is enough for one sample that scientists think they can reliably divide them into males and females. While the entire species is small by today’s human standards, its females are markedly smaller and smaller than their males. At just over a meter tall, Lucy is one of those smaller specimens, thus a female.

Okay, and what do we learn from examining Lucy’s bones closely? A lot Let’s start with the evidence that it was in fact a hominid, which means that she walked upright. The femur, the thigh bone, meets the knee joint at an angle, and the kneecap has a distinctive lip whose function is to prevent it from dislocating because of that angle. This configuration made it possible for Lucy to balance on one leg as she would need a fleeting moment with each step. Similarly, the pelvis is shaped to allow Lucy’s torso to balance on that one leg for the same fleeting moments. In addition, we creatures that remain upright all the time also develop a certain curvature of the spine: Lucy’s vertebrae show signs of that same curvature. And even in those bones, there’s more to support his bipedalism.

They also tell us about Lucy’s age. I mentioned earlier that Lucy is just over a meter tall. Most modern humans of that height are children. Do we know that Lucy was also not a child, and if so how?

One pointer: His skull doesn’t have as long a gap as we see in children. It is closed, which should have been in an adult skull. In his jawbone, his wisdom teeth are evident. These typically appear in our late teens, and are thus a reliable sign of physical maturity (and possibly intellectual maturity as well, which is why they are “wisdom” teeth). Lucy’s wisdom teeth had healed from her gums. They also show signs of wear, which means she has been using them to chew her food for some time. Overall, her bones make it clear that she was a mature adult at the time of her death.

And how did she die? A few years later, elsewhere in Haider, Johansson’s team was replaced by A.K. afarensis fossils were found. These were nine adults and four children – thus called the “First Family” – who were all apparently buried together by some disaster. What about Lucy? He has a hole in his pubic bone due to the teeth of a carnivore. But it is unlikely that he died, as the rest of his bones show no signs of being chewed, which would normally have been done after a carnivore killed him. So we don’t know what led to Lucy’s murder.

Whatever it was, Lucy was resurrected some 3.18 million years later, if you like, when Johansson and Gray found her remains buried in Hadar. This and other A. afarensis discoveries over the years have actually opened up a lot of avenues for more research. For example, Lucy used to walk straight, but what did her gait look like? And to be honest, does she, like other apes we know, spend most of her time climbing trees?

In any case, Lucy captured the scientific and even popular imagination like only a few other archaeological discoveries have ever made. That’s why he has put his name into another scientific endeavor entirely. The Lucy spacecraft will launch tomorrow (October 16) and will visit several asteroids over the next 12 years. Seven of them are Jupiter’s “Trojans,” a swarm of asteroids that orbit that giant planet.

Lucy the Hominid gave us a lot of insight into our human evolution. Likewise, Lucy the Cosmic Voyager will teach us a lot about how the Solar System formed and how its planets evolved. After all, if the bones in Ethiopia can tell stories about the distant past, why shouldn’t Jupiter’s rocks of that cycle do the same?

In fact, NASA refers to the Trojans as “the time capsule from the birth of our solar system.” Time Capsule: Many of Lucy’s bone fragments were the same.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds, Lucy right here on earth with diamonds.

Dilip D’Souza, once a computer scientist, now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinner. His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun