Lucy and the Search for Earliest Man.

In the early 1970s, if you had asked most Americans who the reigning king of "early man" studies was, they almost certainly would have said Richard Leakey, or perhaps his father, Louis Leakey. Both were made famous by National Geographic television specials celebrating their discoveries of fossil remains of large-brained tool users in East Africa. But much of that changed in 1974, when a team led by American Don Johanson and Frenchman Maurice Taieb reported that they had found a three-million-year-old hominid (humanlike) skeleton in Afar, Ethiopia. The fossil was older and more complete than any hominid ever found before. The shape of the pelvis showed it to be female, while the knee joint and thigh revealed that she walked upright. She was surprisingly short, less than four feet tall. Whimsically, the English members of the...