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Lucy and her kin

One of the most famous fossils ever discovered, Lucy is the skeletal remains of an Australopithecus afarensis. Found in Ethiopia in 1974, she lived around 3.2 million years ago and was a bipedal hominid, with feet adapted for walking upright. The history of human evolution extends both forwards and backwards from this point. Hominidae, the taxonomic family that humans share with their closest living relatives, the great, apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and bonobos, the last controversially suggested to be closer to Lucy than modern humans) shared a common ancestry until quite recently in evolutionary terms, perhaps differentiating 6 million years or so ago. The first beings to walk upright comfortably seem to have been the Australopithecus genus, developing around 4 million years ago; they had smaller brains than even modern apes, and became extinct perhaps 2 million years ago. But they were able to develop tools, and genus Homo (which includes modern humans) evolved from them.