Lucy The Beginnings Of Humankind Summary

In the book “Lucy: the beginnings of Humankind” by Donald Johanson the author himself writes his journey of how his friend Tom Gray and himself experienced the most surprising encounter with the oldest fossil of a hominid that they later called Lucy. Donald Johanson and Tom Gray are pale anthropologists and are very well known for their discovery of Lucy. At the beginning of the book the author writes in the first person illustrating how rare it is to find fossils, many who study in this field sometimes have no luck in finding such extraordinary old fossils. Johanson feels “lucky” to have been able to find such fossils that many have been trying to find without any luck. When Johanson and Gray were at a camp in the Afar desert, they went exploring for sediments, fossils, traces that would lead them to a new discovery. They realized that many of the fossils that they were finding on their way had already been found, but luckily before they were about to leave back to the camp Johanson found part of a hominid arm. At first Gray did not wanted to believe Johanson, but then they began to form the puzzle of what it was a hominid.
Back at the camp, they were excited to share the news with
Some contributors to these oppositions were Charles Darwin and Eugene Dubois. The book went into more detail about these two characters in the book. The author talks about them in detail because they too helped Johanson to fill in the gaps of his insufficient data about Lucy. Dubois had also found fossils of a “Java ape-man.” He believed that Neanderthals were the evolution of humankind. The author explained that Dubois had read Darwin’s theory of apes’ evolution, but that he did not completely understood what Darwin really meant. Darwin believed that there were linkages between apes and Neanderthals, but that in between these two species there needed to be another of the two