How we misunderstood what the Lucy fossil reveals about ancient humans

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A reconstruction of the famous hominin Lucy

Frank Nowikowski/Alamy

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.

One hundred years ago, on 28 November 1924, anthropologist Raymond Dart opened a crate. It held a consignment of fossils from Taung, a quarry in South Africa, including a small skull that looked part-ape, part-human. Dart named it “Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa”. It was the first Australopithecus specimen to be identified, and the first evidence that early humans evolved in…

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