The fossilized bones of an Australopithecus afarensis was discovered near the village of Hadar, Ethiopia in 1974. The specimen, named Lucy, was about 3.2 million years old. Almost 40 percent of the skeleton was recovered, top image. Lucy was an adult female, stood 1.1 meters, and weighed 29 kilos. In appearance, she resembled a chimpanzee, but her pelvis and leg bones functioned in the same manner as those of modern humans and provided strong evidence of Lucy standing and walking in an upright position. In 1984, a total of 108 bones of an early Homo erectus skeleton was uncovered near Kenya’s Lake Turkana, bottom image. The skeleton was of an adolescent boy and dated to being 1.5 million years old. He stood at 163 centimeters and weighed 68 kilos. Turkana Boy lived during the early Pleistocene, an epoch when anatomically modern humans evolved.
