Lucy's position in the history of human evolution is currently being challenged. The Lucy fossil species, or Australopithecus afarensis, was long believed to be an ancestor species that humans ...

Recent fossil finds could mean that "Lucy" wasn't our direct ancestor, some scientists say. Others strongly disagree.

Lucy lived in a wide range of habitats from northern Ethiopia to northern Kenya. Researchers now believe she wasn't the only australopithecine species there. When you purchase through links on our ...

From a distance, it might have looked like a small child was wending her way through the waving grass along a vast lake. But a closer look would have revealed a strange, in-between creature — a ...

The reconstructed skeleton of Lucy, found in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, and Grace Latimer, then age 4, daughter of a research team member. James St. John/Flickr, CC BY In 1974, on a survey in Hadar in ...

Fifty years after a fossil skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis was unearthed in Ethiopia, we know so much more about how this iconic species lived and died.

With long limbs and a big brain, the ancient hominin Australopithecus afarensis is among the most human-like of our potential ancestors. Exactly how A. afarensis combined human- and ape-like traits ...

Paleoanthropologists have learned a lot about Lucy, the world’s most famous hominin fossil, since she was discovered in 1974. And her fossils are still yielding new insights Emily Driehaus 50 years ...

Lucy’s kind had small, chimplike brains that, nevertheless, grew at a slow, humanlike pace. This discovery, reported April 1 in Science Advances, shows for the first time that prolonged brain growth ...