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A surge of discoveries in recent years has brought anthropologists closer to the answer. In 1972 Maurice Taieb, 40, of France's National Center for Scientific Research, and Donald Carl Johanson, 34, of Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, found stone tools dating back 2.6 million years in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Two years later their team made an even more dramatic discovery. Not far from their first find, they uncovered the fossilized remnants of a 20-year-old female Australopithecus lying in a layer of sediment 3 million years old. Unlike most other fossils of early man —a tooth here, a bone fragment there, occasionally a portion of a skull—this one comprised a good part of the skeleton.
Named after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lucy was a small creature, not much more than a meter tall, with a brain capacity about a third that of modern man. Lucy's skeleton gave scientists their best clues yet to the proportions of Australopithecus, and revealed her to be surprisingly short-legged. But the find left no doubts that she walked erect. The shape of her pelvis showed clearly that she was bipedal.
Other researchers were adding to the evolutionary mosaic. In 1969, after re-evaluating the fragmentary remains of a monkey-size creature called Ramapithecus —found in India's Siwalik Hills and first described by Yale Paleontologist G.E. Lewis is in 1934—Elwyn Simons, then at Yale, and his former student David Pilbeam became convinced that this creature too was an ancestor. They noted that his teeth were far closer to those of other hominids (manlike creatures) than to those of apes. Indeed, says Simons, 47, who now heads the Duke University Center for the Study of Primate Biology and History, "Ramapithecus is ideally structured to be an ancestor of hominids. If he isn't, we don't have anything else that is."
If Simons and Pilbeam are right, man's roots have been pushed even further back. Dating techniques have established beyond doubt that Ramapithecus—whose remains have turned up in India, Pakistan, East Africa, the Middle East and Central Europe—was alive and well at least 14 million years ago.
But the most exciting of the recent discoveries have come from East Africa and Richard Leakey, In 1972, Bernard Ngeneo, a Kenyan member of Leakey's fossil-hunting team, spotted a few scraps of bone exposed by erosion in sandy sediments in a steep gully near Lake Turkana's eastern shore. Working carefully, the Leakey team sifted scores of additional fragments out of the soil, then turned them over to Meave Leak ey, a paleontologist, and Anatomist Bernard Wood for assembly. As the last pieces of the six -week reconstruction job were put in place, the team mem bers found themselves staring into the empty sockets of a highly evolved hominid. The skull, called "1470" after its National Museums of Kenya catalogue number, was manlike in configuration and, according to Leakey's measurements, once contained a brain of 800 cc.—more than half the average size of a modern human brain. But what excited the team most was the age of the skull. Probably a Homo habilis, 1470 was more than 2