Humanity's most famous ancestor is named after a Beatles song.
In 1974 the expedition camp in Ethiopia played 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' loudly all evening, so the newly found skeleton became Lucy.
The events
- Lucy is discovered1974 · Hadar, Afar, Ethiopia. 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'.
- The Beatles' first album1963 · London. In March 1963 the Liverpool quartet released their debut album, recorded at Abbey Road in a single day. Beatlemania followed, and the Beatles went on to transform popular music and youth culture worldwide.
More amazing facts
- 1966 · 1973 · 2008 The architect of the Sydney Opera House never saw it finished.
- 1966 · 1970 · 1983 The Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen twice.
- 1966 · 1967 One of the first computer-versus-computer chess matches was won by a program from Moscow.
- 1967 The first pulsar was jokingly named LGM-1, for 'little green men'. In 1967 Cambridge student Jocelyn Bell spotted radio pulses so regular that the team seriously checked whether they could be signals from aliens.
- 1968 Almost every high jumper today goes over the bar backwards, thanks to one American.
- 1968 · 1974 Sticky notes came from a glue that didn't stick well.