Analysis Of Lucy The Beginning Of Mankind By Donald Johanson

1315 Words3 Pages

On November 24, 1974, an American Anthropologist by the name of Donald Johanson and his research team, made a ground-breaking discovery that caused a mass dispute in human evolution. Dr. Johanson documented in his book, Lucy The Beginning Of Mankind, the discoveries he and his team have come across. Dr. Johanson and his team discovered a skeleton of a hominid, dated between 3.9 to 3 million years old (164). The hominid, which they referred to as Lucy, was discovered while surveying Hadar, in the Dafar region of Ethiopia (164-166). Lucy’s discovery, a 41% complete human ancestor caused a controversial alteration in the human origins. Lucy was the oldest human ancestor. During the following year, Johanson’s team discovered fossilized remains …show more content…

After analyzing the remaining family group, their appeared to be a difference in size among the discovered fossils. Johanson claimed that all the remains found belonged to one species; however, other anthropologists and scientists disagreed and believed that two or more were from different species. The analysis of Lucy’s knee joint indicated that cranium, mandible, dentation and postcranial skeleton contained unique characterizes, which resembled in a large degree the ones in a human being, and also indicated bipedal locomotion. After analyzing the remaining family group, their appeared to be a difference in size among the discovered fossils. Johanson claimed that all the remains found belonged to one species; however, other anthropologists and scientists disagreed and believed that two or more were from different …show more content…

Her face was projected, and her skull and brain were smaller than a regular human skull. Her face and brain were small similar to a female chimpanzee, which made her teeth relatively small. Her enamel thickness and the residue found on her teeth indicate that her diet varied among meat and fruits. Ardi’s lower back more vertebrae compared to a back of arboreal African apes. Most important, her pelvis and hips were positioned so she can walk up, will also being capable of climbing trees. She also had large hands and no apposable thumb and a big toe for grasping, her wrists were very flexible compared to modern apes, yet similar in a way to

Show More
Related

  • Analysis of Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

    504 Words  | 2 Pages

    Lucy Gayheart is a young, spirited, intelligent music student from Havorford, on the South Platte River. In the winters, she attends a conservatory in Chicago, under the tutelage of Professor Auerbach. In Chicago, she lives in a room above a German bakery, where she takes her breakfasts and suppers. These small quarters do not distress her; indeed, she craves the solitude of her own will, her own piano, her own bed. She walks hungrily through Chicago, her appetite for life never disappointed by the thriving midwestern metropolis. She is beautiful, she is talented, and her young heart has never been broke. The year is 1901. At some point in everyone's life, you meet someone whom you think can lift you beyond where you are, to a place where you al...

    Read More

  • Anthropology - Lucy in Hadar

    557 Words  | 2 Pages

    In a search to find our ancestors, several anthropologists have found evidence to support their conclusions. In the films about Don Johanson's discovery of Lucy in Hadar, one may be very intrigued by the first film but very disturbed by the second film.

    Read More

  • Lucy Stone Thesis

    530 Words  | 2 Pages

    “I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.” (www.doonething.org). Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts on August 13, 1818. Her parents, Francis Stone and Hannah Matthews, were abolitionists and Congregationalists. Stone retained their anti-slavery opinions but rejected the Congregationalist Church after it criticized abolitionists. Along with her anti-slavery attitude, Lucy Stone also pursued a higher education. She completed local schools at the age of sixteen and saved money until she could attend a term at Mount Holyoke Seminary five years later. In 1843, Stone enrolled at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (later Oberlin College). With her graduation in 1847, she became the first Massachusetts woman to earn a bachelor’s degree. However, Lucy Stone was not done expressing her abolitionist and feminist beliefs to the public (anb.org).

    Read More

  • Sacramento Zoo Observation

    872 Words  | 2 Pages

    They have wide chests and their arms are longer than their legs. Chimpanzees’ hands have four long fingers plus an opposable thumb. Their feet have five toes which includes an opposable big toe. Chimpanzees’ can grasp things with both their hands and their feet. Male chimpanzees are larger than female chimpanzees and are slightly sexually dimorphic. Chimpanzees are quadrupeds that typically walk using the soles of feet and the knuckles of their hands. They sometimes walk upright only when they need to use their arms to carry things but this is a rare occurrence. Chimps are also good at brachiating and climbing trees which is where they spend most of their time even when they sleep. Their dental formula is 2.1.2.3. Chimpanzees’ have y5/x4 molars, making them frugivores, and a diastema to fit their upper canines. Their diet includes fruit, leaves, flowers, seeds, smaller mammals, birds, insects, and grubs. When chimps aren’t resting, they can be very active. I enjoyed watching the Chimpanzees’ swing on the ropes and climb up and down the trees. Chimpanzees are

    Read More

  • Anthropology 101 Report: Australopithecus Afarensis

    670 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...s much of the time that some people have been led to believe. This belief had begun when they had discovered a fossil that has since been given the title “Selam”. “Selam” is the skull of a three year old female Australopithecus Afarensis who is believed to have been alive about 3.3 million years ago, having been discovered in the year 2000 in Ethiopia, Dikika by a paleoanthropologist named Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged. With Selam they have found that with the skeleton of her, that it shares many similarities when compared to the bone structure of an ape, meaning that the A. Afarensis may have lived a somewhat arboreal lifestyle. They at first checked the shoulder blades of “Selam”, with both remaining in fully intact which is considered to be very rare due the fact that the shoulder blades had remained intact through 3.3 million years, as it would allow them to find out

    Read More

  • Research Paper On Homo Naledi

    1210 Words  | 3 Pages

    Four hypotheses of how the bodies got there ­ occupation, water transport, predation, and death trap ­ were ruled out. A new hypothesis was formulated ­ what if Homo naledi intentionally buried their dead? Although there is not enough evidence yet to confirm this, such behavior would be significant in that it would precede previous cases of the behavior in Neanderthals and humans. This would add to the argument that Homo naledi are of the genus Homo. After the examination of these fossils and extensive research, it was concluded that Homo naledi were a new species of the Homo genus.

    Read More

  • Bigfoot: In Search of the Truth

    971 Words  | 2 Pages

    ... over the print is correct. All of these facts are bittersweet though, since sample specimens have nothing to be compared to since no actual creature specimen has been collected. It can be concluded, however, that these remains did not come from any animal currently known to modern science.

    Read More

  • The Piltdown Man

    741 Words  | 2 Pages

    Decieveexample: Piltdown ManFor forty years they were considered one of the archaeological finds of the century: A fragment of jaw and a part of a skull that could prove man evolved from the apes. They were the bones of Eoanthropus dawsoni found near Piltdown Common in Sussex. The bones of the "Missing Link." Not since 1953, the name "Piltdown" hasn't been associated with great scientific discovery, but great scientific fraud. It was in that year that a group of scientists, led by Kenneth Page Oakley, attempted to use the new method of fluorine testing to get a more exact date on the bones. What the test showed surprised them:

    Read More

  • Lucy's Autobiography Of A Face

    1173 Words  | 3 Pages

    Many people have different perceptions of suffering. Some of them see sickness and trauma as the main causes of sorrow and anguish in a person’s life. Rarely does a person think that one’s physical appearance can be a cause of sorrow and misery. This is Lucy’s story. She recounts the events of her life in her book Autobiography of a Face. She developed cancer as a young child, and this forced her to undergo surgery and numerous sessions of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. She had to endure numerous stares and insults from other people. This was a trying time for the young girl considering what she had to undergo. However, it did not compare to her later years. She spent countless hours in hospitals trying to get the perfect face. She did not want to be different from everyone else. In the end, she realized that the beauty and satisfaction that she was looking for were deeper within her. She could not get what she was looking for in the mirror or in the approval of others. To Lucy, being different from others was worse than the cancer she had. Despite the numerous challenges she faced, Lucy remained resilient.

    Read More

  • Bipedal Locomotion in Early Hominids

    486 Words  | 1 Pages

    Until recently, the oldest fossil species to provide evidence for bipedalism was Australopithecus afarensis, of which the best example of is the 3.2 million year old skeleton called Lucy found in Hadar, Ethiopia. According to article 19: Sunset at the Savanna, in 1995 Meave Leakey of the national Museums of Kenya and her colleagues made public the discovery of and older hominid species Australopithecus anamensis (getting its name from the Turkana word for lake "anam" having been found near lake Turkana and the site of another ancient lake). Leakey's team found a tibia from this creature that is quite human like and emphatically bipedal, "in size and practically all details of the knee and ankle joints… (it) resembles the one from the fully bipedal A. afarensis". The site where the fossils were found was dated to 4.2-3.9 million years ago; making 4.2mya the oldest date at which we can say that bipedalism has been proven to have emerged. There are also many other more recent fossils which have evidenceof bipedalism: Australopithecus afr...

    Read More

  • Neanderthal Extinction

    711 Words  | 2 Pages

    Scientists thought that interbreeding would be a logical assumption to the Neanderthal conundrum.  Unfortunately, any evidence of DNA from Neanderthals mixed with human DNA is difficult to come by because their fossils are usually tarnished upon finding.  That is until Svante Paabo, and his research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, came across the remains of twenty-four Neanderthals and forty early humans.*  All of these fossils were nearly 40,000 years old and were from Germany, Russia, and Croatia.  Nine of these fossils (four Neanderthal and five human)

    Read More

  • Earth 2100: The Story Of Lucy's Life

    1403 Words  | 3 Pages

    From the beginning of time the human race has sought advancement, from the early innovations of the wheel to the discovery of coal as a power source. We never could have imagined that the things that have put us above any other species might be the things that destroy us. Earth 2100 tells the story of Lucy: a fictional character who is born in the year 2009 and lives to see what the year 2100 brings, and it is not pretty. Lucy experiences some pretty scary stuff throughout her life and her perspective as a child, a young adult, a middle aged woman, and an elderly woman vary. Throughout the 21st century the world experiences severe natural disasters, wars for the few remaining natural resources, the breakdown of countries and their borders,

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Pbs's Documentary Great Transformations

    1774 Words  | 4 Pages

    For instance, the whale, the biggest mammal that lives in the water, was found to have had legs and used to dwell on land millions of years ago. While in Pakistan, Phil Gingrich, a geologist and paleontologist, came across a fossil that resembled that of a wolf but had a “bump” on the back of the skull which was found to part of an inner ear,

    Read More

  • Australopithecus Afarensis

    303 Words  | 1 Pages

    Lucy was discovered in East Africa in the 1970s, but she lived about 3.5 million years ago, this means that she is the oldest bipedal ape ever found. She did not look or act like humans do but he skeleton started to show some similar traits. Her thigh bones slanted inwards like humans’ to support her as she stands, her pelvis was no longer flat like a chimp’s but it was cupped like ours to hold her guts while she stood upright. Her mouth had also started to show human traits, including losing huge canine teeth. That said, Lucy is still very different from humans because she has a brain and body about the size of a chimp’s and she has long arms for climbing trees

    Read More

  • Essay On Homo Erectus

    1493 Words  | 3 Pages

    1.9 million years ago, Homo Habilis of East Africa had evolved into an entirely new species known as Homo erectus. Homo erectus directly translates to "Upright man" and for good reason. One of largest anatomical advancements of Homo erectus was their arm and leg bones which were very similar in shape and proportions to that of modern day humans. "Their legs would have made Homo erectus efficient long distance runners like modern humans."(Dennis). Along with their longer more developed legs, Homo erectus's leg were also hairless which allowed them to evaporate sweat and thus be more efficient at not overheating. This advantage allowed Homo erectus to chase down four legged mammals to the point of heat exhaustion and thus drastically increase the efficiency their hunting tactics. Another change in the legs of Homo erectus was their slightly more narrow pelvises. This forced the size of a child’s head to be smaller at birth and undergo most of its development during childhood. (Dennis)

    Read More

More about Analysis Of Lucy The Beginning Of Mankind By Donald Johanson

Open Document