Lucy, being the oldest and most complete fossil of an early human ever found, still has a few secrets to reveal. It was discovered in 1974, the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton stunned archaeologists who unearthed the fossil while digging in an isolated spot in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Read more from DailyMail:
Now, a new look at the ancient hominin’s skeleton suggests one of the bones may, in fact, belong to a baboon.  Despite being uncovered 40 years ago, Lucy is still being studied to learn more about our ancestors.
The skeleton belongs to a species called Australopithecus afarensis and is around 40 per cent complete. When discovered in Ethiopia, Lucy was the only skeleton of the species known; she would’ve stood 3.5 feet (about a meter) tall. Currently, more than 300 individuals of this species, which lived between about 3.85 million and 2.95 million years ago, have been uncovered
The strange discovery of a baboon bone was made when Gary Sawyer and Mike Smith at the American Museum of Natural History in New York began work on a reconstruction of Lucy’s skeleton.
‘Mike pointed out that one of the [vertebra] fragments, which no one, including me, had really paid close attention to, looked fairly small to fit with the rest of Lucy’s vertebral column,’ Scott Williams at New York University told the New Scientist.
