3.2Myears agoFossil c. 3.2 million years old; found 24 November 1974 · Hadar, Afar region

Lucy and the hominin fossils of Hadar

The fossil bones of Lucy laid out in a display case at the National Museum of Ethiopia — Photo: Ninara from Helsinki, Finland. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1974 Donald Johanson and Tom Gray found about 40 per cent of a single skeleton eroding from a gully at Hadar in Ethiopia's Afar region. The female Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed Lucy and in Amharic Dinkinesh, lived about 3.2 million years ago and walked upright with a small brain, showing that bipedalism came long before large brains.