It was already pretty hot by the time Donald Johanson and his graduate student, Tom Gray, arrived at the site at Hadar, ...

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

Dr. Johanson and his team were looking for the evolutionary “missing link”… the creature who had evolved from a plain old ape ...

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

About 3.2 million years ago, among the prehistoric forests of what is now Ethiopia, a small human was folded into the fossil ...

Lucy may be the best-known prehuman fossil in the world. But other famous fossils have given us important insight into our ...

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

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

When palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson discovered a bone fragment ... but I didn’t realise it would actually launch a new species,” says Johanson. Lucy’s anatomy provided evidence that ...

Reportedly, Dr. Johanson returned to camp in 1974 with some of Lucy’s fossilized remains, and as team celebrated, someone ...

NPR's Scott Simon speaks with paleoanthropologist, Donald Johanson, about the 50th anniversary of his biggest discovery, Lucy, an early human ancestor.

SIMON: Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, founding director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and the man who found Lucy. Thank you so much for speaking with us.