Hominin finds challenge Lucy’s place in the human family tree

News from Science recounts Don Johanson and Tom Gray’s 1974 discovery of Lucy, a 40%-complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton dating to 3.2 million years ago. Some once thought her species lived close to the split between the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees. The publisher says discoveries of hominins older than Lucy and others her age have since pushed that split millions of years deeper in time, challenging her position as “mother of us all.”