Seven Skeletons

by Lydia Pyne

Today, we know Peking Man through the recently recovered canine tooth and a couple of other molars sent back to Uppsala from Zhoukoudian during those initial excavations—but we know Peking Man better through his plaster casts, photographs, and stories. The fossils are famous because we don’t have them anymore. Peking Man is, indeed, a curious case of celebrity; a fossil made famous by its paleo-noir mystique.

  To date, the fossils have not been recovered.

  Portrait of Lucy, AL 288-1. (Photo permissions: CC-BY-2.5)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE ASCENSION OF AN ICON: LUCY IN THE SKY

  To Locality 162 with Gray in AM. Feel good,” paleoanthropologist Dr. Donald Johanson wrote in his field journal early the morning of November 30, 1974.1 The good feeling Johanson recorded in his notes turned out, in fact, to be a lucky premonition—that morning, he and graduate student Tom Gray discovered an amazing fossil on the slopes of Hadar, a fossil site in northern Ethiopia where Johanson’s team had been working that field season. Johanson and Gray’s remarkable discovery was a fossil hominin skeleton, the most complete early hominin skeleton in paleoanthropology’s collections. The team promptly christened the discovery Lucy. In subsequent years, researchers assigned Lucy to a then new species of extinct hominin, Australopithecus afarensis—a species that lived 3.25 million years ago. In the years since her discovery, she has become one of the twentieth century’s most iconic fossil finds.

  Some fossils acquire special significance or celebrity status because they are a “first” of something, or the oldest, the original, or even the place with the most of a unique collection of fossils. A few fossils become archetypes for representing long-extinct species, like the Old Man of La Chapelle. Some become type specimens, significant in their standing as a prototype of a fossil’s biological category, like the Taung Child. Some fossils can be cultural emblems that crystallize a particular tradition of scientific thought and practice, and directly impact the trajectory of future research. But the discovery of Lucy that November morning in 1974 introduced a new kind of celebrity fossil to paleoanthropology. It introduced a fossil that would function as an icon—a venerated scientific object, a key piece in the puzzle of human evolution, and a cultural touchstone. In the span of four decades, Lucy has moved from merely being an extinct taxonomic classification of a then species of hominin, Australopithecus afarensis, to being the specimen against which all fossils are measured.

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  To make a fossil discovery famous, it needs a compelling origin story, and Lucy’s narrative is masterfully constructed. Just like the episode of Raymond Dart finding the Taung Child in a box of fossils before he was dragged off to a wedding, the origins of fossil discoveries are told and retold as vibrant oral history in paleoanthropology fieldwork-centric science. Lucy’s beginning is no different.

  In the mid-1970s, paleoanthropology’s human origins–oriented research in East Africa was in full swing with multiple research projects exploring the potential for new fossil sites along that region’s Rift Valley. Geologically, the Rift Valley is a system of volcanic rift basins that extends from the northern part of Ethiopia—or Afar Depression—running as far south as Malawi and Mozambique as the African and Indian plates continue to separate from each other. The Afar Triangle is even more geologically interesting; it is a tectonic triple junction where the African and Indian plates also separate from the Arabian one. For paleoanthropology, the Afar Triangle is an area unparalleled in the world due to the number of fossil localities exposed by the tectonic rending. Researchers like the Leakey family had worked in East Africa for decades at sites like Olduvai in Tanzania, where these fossil sites follow the geologic uplift along its fractured tectonic boundary. (The Olduvai Gorge site in northern Tanzania stretches approximately thirty kilometers along the Rift Valley; since systematic excavations began in the 1930s, it has yielded a trove of fossil hominin remains.) The Afar region was a completely new, unexplored part of the East African rift system, and its geological complexity piqued the interests of geologists and paleoanthropologists alike. As such, there were high hopes that exploration and surveys of Afar would yield new fossils that could play a role in the science of human origins.

  In 1974, the International Afar Research Expedition (IARE), a geology and paleosciences research consortium, began its third formal field season at Hadar, one of these exciting unexplored sites in the Afar Depression. The 1971 IARE founding members included American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, French geologist and paleoanthropologist Maurice Taieb, and French anthropologist Yves Coppens, who together would build on the logical groundwork established by the Texan geologist and paleontologist Jon Kalb. (During those first years of IARE, Kalb and his family lived year-round in Ethiopia, working to keep the IARE functioning between field seasons.) Archaeologist Mary Leakey was another of the founding members, lending her reputation and expertise to the project, but she later left the consortium. By fall of 1973, the team had expanded to include other researchers and graduate students, and in November 1974 the IARE had really hit its scientific stride. Fossil locales in Hadar yielded a trove of different mammalian fossils, the team’s geologic mapping progressed well, and scientific papers were published in good order. The previous season had even yielded hominin material—a knee joint that showed a species able to walk bipedally; since the fossils were around three million years old, the knee joint indicated that bipedal walking was a very old characteristic in humans’ evolutionary story.

  During the 1974 season, yet more hominin materials—in addition to other mammalian fossils—poured into the IRAE’s collections during field surveys. The Ethiopian Herald publicized the team’s initial discoveries that field season. On October 21, 1974, partway through that field season, the newspaper announced “Ancient Homo Sapiens Found in Central Afar” and featured a front-page photo of Ethiopian team member Ato Alemayehu Asfaw, Johanson, and a representative from the Ministry of Culture, all examining the fossil cache that included a complete upper jaw, half of another upper jaw, and half of a mandible. All of those fossils—according to that press account—were four million years old.2

  But the real discovery of that field season came a month after the press conference—the November 1974 morning that Johanson recorded in his notes. In his coauthored 1981 bestseller Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind, Johanson paints a spectacularly thrilling account of finding Lucy:

  As a paleoanthropologist … I am superstitious. Many of us are, because the work we do depends a great deal on luck. The fossils we study are extremely rare, and quite a few distinguished paleoanthropologists have gone a lifetime without finding a single one. I am one of the more fortunate. This was only my third year in the field at Hadar, and I had already found several. I know I am lucky, and I don’t try to hide it. That is why I wrote “feel good” in my diary. When I got up that morning I felt it was one of these days when you should press your luck. One of those days when something terrific might happen …

  Throughout most of that morning, nothing did… . The gully in question was just over the crest of the rise where we had been working all morning. It had been thoroughly checked out at least twice before by other workers, who had found nothing interesting. Nevertheless, conscious of the “lucky” feeling that had been with me since I woke, I decided to make that small final detour. There was virtually no bone in the gully. But as we turned to leave, I noticed something lying on the ground partway up the slope.

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  And it’s this first-person account of Lucy’s discovery that has so firmly established the genre of fossil discovery in paleoanthropological memoir:

  “It’s a bit of a hominid arm,” I said. “That piece right next to your hand. That’s hominid too.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Gray. “By God, you’d better believe it!” shouted Gray. “Here it is. Right here!” His voice went up into a howl. I joined him. In that 110-degree heat we began jumping up and down. With nobody to share our feeling, we hugged each other, sweaty and smelly, howli
ng and hugging in the heat-shimmering gravel, the small brown remains of what now seemed almost certain to be parts of a single hominid skeleton lying all around us.

  The camp was rocking with excitement. That first night we never went to bed at all. We talked and talked. We drank beer after beer. There was a tape recorder in the camp, and a tape of the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” went belting out into the night sky, and was played at full volume over and over out of sheer exuberance. At some point during that unforgettable evening … the new fossil picked up the name of Lucy, and has been so known ever since.3

  The discovery was a partial skeleton of a very old female hominin. The petite specimen, measuring just under three feet tall, would have weighed a bit more than sixty pounds in life. In an interview with Time magazine in 2009, Johanson acknowledged the fame and personality that are inexorably associated with the fossil. “I think she’s captured the public’s attention for a number of reasons,” he suggested. “One, she’s fairly complete. If you remove the hand bones and foot bones, she’s 40% complete, so one actually gets an image of an individual, of a person. It’s not just like looking at a jaw with some teeth. People can envision a little three-and-a-half foot tall female walking around. Also, I must say, her name is one that people find easy and non-threatening. People think of her as a real personality.”4

  If we measure units of knowledge in Libraries of Congress, then we measure the scientific significance and cultural importance of fossils in units of Lucy today. But how and why has she become the icon that she is?

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  After Lucy’s recovery, Johanson and the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture organized another press conference, held December 20, 1974, and the next day the Ethiopian Herald ran the front-page headline “In Central Afar: Most Complete Remains of Man Discovered.”5 After the conference, and with the close of that third IARE field season, Lucy was whisked away to Cleveland for five years, where she was cleaned, prepped, casted, and studied. She was later returned to the National Museum of Ethiopia on January 3, 1980.

  But the events that surrounded Lucy’s finding were, of course, more complex than any simple narrative might imply, and the background to her origin story offers a window into the complicated relationship of science and politics. In his Adventures in the Bone Trade, geologist Jon Kalb offers a sobering contextualization of Lucy’s discovery in the turbulent political climate of Ethiopia in 1974—or Heder 1967, in the Ethiopian calendar. While the scientific teams had been working in the Afar region, political turmoil had settled in the capital and fanned out amid the country’s revolution. Kalb points out that General Mengistu Haile Mariam had executed political prisoners affiliated with Emperor Haile Selassie in the early morning of November 24, mere days before Lucy’s discovery. (In his 2009 book Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, Johanson states that Lucy’s discovery date was November 24, 1974, rather than November 30, 1974, as recorded in his 1981 bestseller, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. Lucy’s discovery date is generally celebrated as November 24, sharing the November date with the publication of On the Origin of Species.) Historian Paul Henze described that apocalyptic night: “On 23 November 1974 Mengistu sent troops… . That night 59 former imperial officials were summarily shot. All had surrendered or been arrested during the previous summer and were being held for investigation. Thus, in a single night the Ethiopian revolution turned bloody. Blood never ceased to flow for the next 17 years.”6 The juxtaposition of events—revolution and evolution—is a sobering reminder that science is a social activity, set amid its political environs. But this puts Lucy squarely in the middle of a specifically nationalistic narrative for Ethiopia.

  “Later that same morning at Hadar, Johanson found ‘Lucy.’ … Thus on the day that Addis Ababa awoke to the news of the end of humanity, at least as the families of the slain understood it, the IARE celebrated the discovery of humanity’s beginning,” Kalb reminisces. “One of the ironies of these respective events is that a reason given for the execution of many of Ethiopia’s elite was their cover-up of the famine in Wallo, where Lucy was found, and where tens of thousands of Afar nomads had died of government neglect. The two monumental events on that November day in 1974 may have marked the first time in Ethiopia’s history that the Afar people and their unique land were given so much attention.”7

  Kalb makes no bones about the significance of the fossil. “Lucy was a great discovery,” he asserts. “Announced at another press conference in Addis Ababa on December 20, the find was described as a 40-percent-complete skeleton of a diminutive, bipedal, adult female about one meter high… . The array of 63 pieces of the skeleton were found the day after Richard Leakey, his wife Meave, and Mary Leakey had visited Hadar, and there was great celebration in camp that evening.” Kalb is also quick to point out that the location featured prominently in that 1974 field season. “The Lucy locality, L288, was surrounded by a cluster of seven other fossil localities mapped by Dennis Peak and myself. At one time or another in 1973, probably everyone in camp had walked across L288, Johanson included.”8 The bit of the story about the Beatles, the tape recorder, and Lucy’s nickname that features so prominently in Johanson’s memoirs does not even get a mention—as if it’s simply too sophomoric to discuss amid the contexts of political upheavals.

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  Once it had been discovered, the next step was to formally describe what kind of fossil hominin the team had found. Lucy raised the question of what, if any, of the then recognized possible fossil species she fit into, and it quickly became apparent that she didn’t line up with any known species category. Her discovery meant redrawing an evolutionary tree to take account of this newly discovered species. On March 25, 1976, Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb published “Plio-Pleistocene Hominid Discoveries in Hadar, Ethiopia” in Nature. (The Plio-Pleistocene dates to roughly five million to twelve thousand years ago.) The article summarized the results of the first three IARE seasons and described the recovered remains of twelve hominid individuals from geological deposits around Hadar that were then estimated to be approximately three million years in age. Although the abstract of the paper boldly trumpeted that “the collection suggests that Homo and Australopithecus coexisted as early as 3.0 Myr ago,” the crux of the issue is understated to say the least: “A partial skeleton represents the most complete hominid known from this period.”9 This partial skeleton was AL 288-1, Lucy, and this was her first foray into the world of scientific review, much more subdued and carefully measured than the press conferences in Addis Ababa after her initial discovery. Rather dryly, the article reports:

  The discovery on November 24 of a partial skeleton (AL 288-1) eroding from sand represents the most outstanding hominid specimen collected during the 1974 field season. It is obvious that this discovery provides us with a unique opportunity for reconstructing the anatomy of an early hominin in far more detail than has been previously possible. Extensive descriptive and comparative studies are projected for the AL 288 partial skeleton and will provide us with details of stature, limb, proportions, articulations and biomechanical aspects. Three weeks were devoted to intensive collecting and screening to insure the recovery of all bone fragments from the site. Laboratory preparation and analysis has only just begun, and in this report it is possible to mention only a few salient points.10

  Lucy’s first press conference, Ethiopian Herald, December 21, 1974—the first time “Lucy” appears in print.

  The language of the authors’ descriptions in Nature is clinical—anatomical descriptions with the tone of scientific detachment we expect in academic publication. As a paper intended for scientific peers, it is filled with measurements and field methodologies. The fossil was simply discovered—it is stripped of the social commentary and detail, as its publication in a formal scientific journal demands. Here, in the context of Nature, the discovery was simply AL 288-1; it was a skeleton with amazing potential, but one with only four short paragraphs devoted to the fossil’s anatomical description
s and tantalizing possibilities for analysis, once the skeleton had been fully prepped.

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  “The story of how Lucy got her name is … more than an account of a scientific christening,” science writer Roger Lewin argues in Bones of Contention. “It is a confection of professional and personal responses to an intellectual upheaval in the field. It is a story that, with varying degrees of clarity, reveals the swell of underlying preconceptions.”11 A fossil’s name carries a lot of narrative heft. For the IARE team at Hadar, the fossil was AL 288-1. In an interview celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the fossil’s discovery, Johanson reaffirmed the origin of “Lucy” as the fossil’s nickname: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the name of the album and the song called ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was playing and a member of the team suggested that we name the fossil Lucy and the name stuck.”12

  While “Lucy” came from the Beatles song, her catalog number, AL 288-1, came from the field cataloging process of that 1974 season. “AL” refers to Afar Locality and “288-1” the specific geological locality and specimen catalog number. But it’s not enough for a fossil to simply have a specimen number or a nickname. A fossil needs a scientific appellation in order to have taxonomic and evolutionary status in the paleontology world. Assigning a fossil to a scientific species is an important step in giving the fossil a functioning evolutionary framework. A nickname and a specimen number give a fossil its cultural and methodological context, but it is the taxonomic name that really situates a specimen within its evolutionary framework. Assigning a fossil to a species—especially a new species—writes that fossil into an evolutionary story. If the fossil is a direct ancestor to Homo sapiens, we offer the species a more central, starring role in the drama than if the species is an evolutionary offshoot. In other words, if a newly described hominin species hinges on only a few bits of bone, those few bits of bone carry a lot of scientific weight in order to hold up the legitimacy of a fossil species.