Today, one can think of the apes and humans as cousins. They have common ancestors, but have not descended directly from each other. About 5-7 million years ago, a line of man-like apes grew apart, and evolved independently of the other apes. The oldest, almost completely intact skeleton of an upright ancestor of human – the Australopithecus – was found in 1974 in Ethiopia (Africa). The scientists named it ‘Lucy’.