LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Lucy: Donald Johanson
built 276 days ago
The first time Lucy left Africa, she flew coach, snugly wrapped in tissue and foam inside a naugahyde bag at the feet of her finder, anthropologist Don Johanson. It was 1975, and she was Cleveland-bound for a few years of scientific scrutiny.
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Johanson was able to recover Lucy's left innominate bone and sacrum. Though the sacrum was remarkably well preserved, the innominate was distorted, leading to two different reconstructions. The first reconstruction had little iliac flare and virtually no anterior wrap, creating an ilium that greatly resembled that of an ape. However, this reconstruction proved to be faulty, as the superior pubic rami would not have been able to connect if the right ilium was identical to the left. A later reconstruction by Tim White showed a broad iliac flare and a definite anterior wrap, indicating that Lucy had an unusually broad inner acetabular distance and unusually long superior pubic rami. Her pubic arch was over 90 degrees, similar to modern human females.
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In 1977 Donald Johanson and his colleague Tim White carried out detailed morphological studies on their finds to date, including both Lucy and the "First Family" fossils. They compared the fossils to chimpanzee, gorilla and modern human specimens, and casts of extinct hominid fossils, with particular attention to jaws and dental arcades, and found that their fossils were somewhere between humans and apes, possibly closer to apes, though with essentially human bodies. They reached the conclusion that it could not be classified in the genus Homo and should be in the genus Australopithecus as the new species Australopithecus afarensis. They believed that this extinct hominid would prove to be ancestral to Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus robustus as well as to the genus Homo which includes the modern human species, Homo sapiens,[4] and this conclusion was widely accepted.[2] However, in 2006 scientists Yoel Rak, Avishag Ginzburg, and Eli Geffen carried out a morphological analysis which found that the mandibular ramus (jawbone) of australopithecus afarensis specimen A. L. 822-1 discovered in 2002 closely matches that of a gorilla, and from further studies decided that "australopithecus afarensis" is a member of the robust australopithecines branch of the hominid evolutionary tree and so not a direct ancestor of man. They concluded that Ardipithecus ramidus discovered by White and colleagues in the 1990s is a more likely ancestor of the human clade.[3][5]
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Donald Johanson