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Johanson’s find was highly significant. The age of the fossils, based on associated fauna found at the same level, was estimated to be 3 million years. If the find was confirmed to be hominid, it would provide the first evidence that human ancestors had walked upright as far back as 3 million years ago. In the Hadar camp, there was widespread celebration. Returning to Addis Ababa at the end of the two-month season, Johanson, unwilling to wait for proper authentication, held a solo press conference, making public his discovery, determined to gain full credit. Taieb, the expedition leader, who had by then flown back to Paris, read about it in the newspapers.

Back in the field a year later, while the case of the knee joint was still under discussion, Taieb’s team made more dramatic finds. Within two weeks after setting up camp, Ethiopian researchers found parts of four hominid jawbones; one was a complete palate with all sixteen teeth in place. The bones seemed to combine both primitive and derived features—‘peculiar blend of Homo and australopithecine traits, with a whiff of something more primitive’, according to Johanson. Their age was estimated to be between 3 and 4 million years.

Well aware of the publicity value, the expedition’s members agreed to announce their discovery to the media in Addis Ababa in a statement prepared by Johanson. Using the kind of rhetoric that Louis Leakey favoured, the statement proclaimed ‘an unparalleled breakthrough in the search for the origin of man’s evolution’. It declared: ‘Discovery of the genus Homo older than 3.0 million years is a major step forward in our understanding of early man’s evolution and represents a major revolution in all previous thinking concerning the origin of the group representing modern man’. Previous discoveries from Olduvai and Lake Turkana had only taken the origins of Homo back to slightly over 2 million years. ‘We have in a matter of merely two days extended our knowledge of the genus Homo by nearly 1.5 million years. All previous theories of the origins of the lineage which leads to modern man must now be totally revised. We must throw out many existing theories and consider the possibility that man’s origins go back to well over 4.0 million years’.

However overblown such claims seemed, Johanson’s discovery the next month was truly spectacular. On the morning of 30 November 1974, exploring a fossil locality four miles from camp with an American graduate student, Tom Gray, Johanson spotted a fragment of an arm bone poking from the slope of a gully. At first sight, because of its small size, it appeared to be a monkey, but on closer inspection it lacked the characteristic flange of a monkey.

‘My pulse was quickening’, wrote Johanson in an article for National Geographic. ‘Suddenly I found myself saying: “It’s hominid”’. Higher up the slope, there were other fragments, and he began to realise that he might have found a skeleton. All around lay a multitude of bones: a nearly complete lower jaw, a thighbone, arm bones, ribs, vertebrae. ‘The searing heat was forgotten. Tom and I yelled, hugged each other, danced, mad as any Englishmen in the midday sun’.

Back at camp, the celebrations continued long into the night. Amid the excited talk, a tape recording of the Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’—a title originating from a drawing of a girl surrounded by stars—was played over and over again, at full volume. By morning, the skeleton itself was known as ‘Lucy’.

Lucy was the most complete hominid specimen yet discovered. Excavations over the following three weeks yielded more bones; in all about 40 per cent of the main bones of an entire skeleton—discounting hand and foot bones—was recovered. The bones revealed that Lucy was indeed a young adult female hominid, capable of walking upright, standing at just over three feet tall, with an age estimated to be 3 million years (subsequently pinpointed as 3.18 million years). She possessed a mixture of features, some apelike, others humanlike; but in particular her