Lucy is discovered
A 3.2-million-year-old skeleton shows ancestors walked upright
On 24 November 1974 palaeoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray found about 40% of the skeleton of an australopithecine that lived 3.2 million years ago in Ethiopia's Afar desert. Her pelvis and legs showed that Australopithecus afarensis already walked upright, though its brain was ape-sized. She was named Lucy after a Beatles song playing in camp; in Ethiopia she is Dinkinesh, 'you are marvellous'.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 25 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 6 years later
Europe
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 21 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 13 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 6 years earlier
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 15 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 15 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 17 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 13 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 11 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 15 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 17 years later
Middle East
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 5 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 6 years later
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 16 years later
Asia
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 21 years earlier
- 1970 Bhola cyclone — 4 years earlier
- 1971–1971 Bangladesh Liberation War — 3 years earlier
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 1 year later
- 1976 Tangshan earthquake — 2 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 5 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 4 years earlier
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état — 1 year earlier
- 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens — 6 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 9 years later
Oceania
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 20 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 15 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 18 years later
Alive at the time
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 85)
- Mao Zedong (aged 81)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 56)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 44)
- Haile Selassie (aged 82)
- Golda Meir (aged 76)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 75)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 73)
- Dmitri Shostakovich (aged 68)
- Leonid Brezhnev (aged 68)