This film also relates to Australopithecus afarensis and the methods of archaeological discovery and interpretation. Note how archaeologists and allied specialists work in the field

 

Terms / Concepts

• anatomy
  
  
  • mandible
    
    
    • mandibular ramus
      
      
  • innominate bone (side of the pelvis)
    
    
    • ilium
  • animated left hip of Lucy
    
    
  • saggital crest
    
    
  • supraorbital tori (brow ridges)
    
    
  • knuckle walking (not a stage that hominids have gone through)
    
    
• methods
  
  
  • record casts
    
    
  • "preparator"
    
    
  • fossil reconstruction (Tim White)
    
    
    • mirror imaging
      
      
  • geological dating (stratigraphy)
    
    
  • potasium-argon (K / Ar) dating
    
    
  • surface surveys
    
    
  • The quality of scientific analysis in the lab can be more important than what happens in the field
    
    
• hominid
  
  
  • upright posture -- bipedalism (note posture and locomotion)
    
    
• provisioning hypothesis
  
  
  • Owen Lovejoy
    
    
  • There may have been a change from the males "notifying" females of a food source to actually bringing them food
    
    
• range of variation
  
  
• "primitive" = "ape-like"
  
  
• "African apes" = gorilla and chimpanzee
  
  
  • are knuckle walkers

Notes

• The expedition first found a knee joint in 1973, the first year of fieldwork at Hadar
  
  
  • Lucy in 1974
    
    
  • and the "First Family" in 1975 at Locality 333
    
    
• Lucy, a 40% complete skeleton is no longer the oldest and most complete hominid in the world
  
  
• The earliest probable hominids now include
  
  
• "Eurydice" (1.5-million to 2-million-year-old skull of a female Paranthropus robustus [Australopithecus robustus]) is more complete (27 April 2000)
  
  
• "Little Foot," the world's first-ever find of an entire "ape-man" skull and its skeleton (3.5 mya), was found at Sterkfontein,Transvaal, South Africa in 1998
  
  
• The earliest collection of hominids yet discovered comes from Aramis (4.4 mya)
  
  
• Lothagam in northern Kenya (5.8 - 5.6 mya?)
  
  
• "Millennium Man" [sic.] -- 04 December 2000
  
  
• Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba -- 11 July 2001

 

• About halfway through the first reel, as they are inspecting a new fossil find, Don Johanson says something like "It's amazing when you think that three and a half million years ago there were humans living on this same locality." (He means here, "hominids," rather than "humans," not any fossils from the genus Homo)
  
  
• Archaeology has changed from individuals doing small projects and looking at "a few hundred specimens" by themselves to large multidisciplinary teams of international scientists doing coordinate excavations involving "hundreds of thousands of specimens."
  
  
  • The 1975 International Afar Research Expedition, for example, took 15 science specialists to the field
    
    
• Large collections of fossils, like you see in the scenes from the Cleveland Museum labs, allow anthropologists to understand "range of variation"
  
  
• With the Hadar "First Family" collection from Locality (Site) 333, "there is a "gradient" from very large to very small
  
  
  • that is, there are fossils that "'span the gap' in terms of size, between large and small"
    
    
• The brain, jaws, teeth and dentition are very "primitive" (i.e., ape-like
  
  
• Unexpected sequence: bipedalism (3.7 mya) --> tool manufacture (2.4 [2.6] mya) --> brain expansion (1.8 mya)
  
  
  • Homo erectus dates back to 1.8 mya
    
    
  • What was in their environment that favored upright walking?
    
    
• No other animals' bones other than hominid were found at Locality (Site) 333
  
  
  • The paleontologists found only fossil hominid bones, including over 200 specimens of 15 individuals (men, women, and children)

Cultures / People

• Australopithecus afarensis
• Australopithecus africanus
• Australopithecus robustus (Paranthropus robustus)
• "The First Family" (1975; Locality 333)
• Homo erectus (diet; Stone Tool Technology -- lithics)
• "Moderns" (Homo sapiens Sapiens)

Sites

• Afar Depression (aka Afar Triangle)
  
  
  • Hadar [Ethiopia]
    
    
  • Awash River
    
    
  • Locality (Site) 333
    
    
    • "The First Family" site
      
      
    • already in 1975 they were using at least 15 specialists on the expedition, including a geological mapping team
      
      
• Addis Ababa (Ethiopia)
  
  
• Omo Valley (South Ethiopia)
  
  
• Lake Turkana (fka Lake Rudolf)
  
  
• Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania)
  
  
• Laetoli (Tanzania)
  
  
  • ca. 3.5 - 3.75 mya hominid footprints)

Individuals

• Yves Coppens (3rd co-leader of the Hadar expedition)
• F. Clark Howell (leader of the earlier Omo expedition)
• Don Johanson
• Mary Leakey
• Richard Leakey
• Owen Lovejoy ("provisioning hypothesis")
• "Lucy" (1974)
• Pierre Plank (mapping)
• James Aronson (K / AR dating)
• Maurice Taieb (chief geologist, and 2nd CO-leader of the Hadar expedition who "discovered" Hadar "very early in the 1970s, late 1960s.")
• Tim White (physical anthropologist who worked with Mary Leakey at Laetoli and with Don Johanson in the Afar)

Publications / Bibliography

• Johanson, Donald C.; and Edey, Maitland A. 1981. Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. NY: Simon and Schuster.
  
  
• Leakey, Richard E.; and Lewin, Roger. 1978. People of the Lake: Mankind and Its Beginnings. NY: Avon.