A 3.2-million-year-old skeleton named after a Beatles song rewrote human origins

In 1974, Donald Johanson found 40 percent of a hominin skeleton eroding out of a gully in Hadar, Ethiopia. The 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis walked upright on two legs despite a brain barely larger than a chimpanzee's, showing bipedalism evolved long before big brains did. The team named her Lucy after 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds', played on repeat at their camp that night.

— Donald Johanson, Lucy (Australopithecus) — Hadar, Ethiopia, 1974