27 Years Ago In Time

The 13,000-year-old hobbit-size hominids found on an Indonesian island add a new branch to the sprawling human family tree first theorized by RICHARD LEAKEY and other scientists after a flurry of discoveries in Africa in the 1970s.

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 of 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 ... As recently as a decade ago, scientists talked about a direct, unbranching line of descent ... Now all that has changed ... While his Australopithecus cousins foraged or scavenged, Homo habilis began to make tools and to hunt. Both actions accelerated his evolution ... "There have been thousands of living organisms," [Leakey] says, "of which a very high percentage has become extinct. There is nothing, at the moment, to suggest that we are not part of that same pattern."

--TIME, Nov. 7, 1977