Fifty years after a fossil skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis was unearthed in Ethiopia, we know so much more about how ...

A collection of 3-million-year-old bones unearthed 50 years ago in Ethiopia changed our understanding of human origins.

The 3.2-million-year-old fossil, discovered 50 years ago, is considered to be one of the most significant early hominin ...

On the anniversary of Lucy’s discovery, paleoanthropologists reflect on what she means to science, and what she taught us ...

In 1974, on a survey in Hadar in the remote badlands ... in the region that is now Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. Dated to 3.2 million years ago, Lucy was the oldest and most complete human ...

An old photo of Donald Johanson sitting in the dirt and excavating a bone The modern story of Lucy began on Nov. 24, 1974, in Hadar, Ethiopia. Johanson and then-graduate student Tom Gray stumbled ...

They call them Denisovans. How have views of Lucy changed over the last 50 years? Donald Johanson is pictured here in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974. - Courtesy Institute of Human Origins/Arizona State ...

Very few people had been to this region of Ethiopia, and people began launching their own expeditions and finding even more exciting things in some ways. But I think that Lucy was the spark.