Seven Skeletons
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But even scientific names become, themselves, historical markers and can point to specific scientific questions or famous discoverers. When Dart called the Taung Child Australopithecus africanus, for example, the name referred to the “southern ape of Africa,” which flew in the face of evolutionary paleoconventions of the early twentieth century. Eoanthropus dawsoni, or “Dawson’s dawn ape,” inexorably links the fossil’s discoverer, Charles Dawson, to the species. Likewise, Homo neanderthalensis denotes that the original discovery of the species came from the Neander Valley in Germany.
In 1978, four years after Lucy’s original discovery, Donald Johanson, Tim White, and Yves Coppens published the article “A New Species of the Genus Australopithecus (Primates: Hominidae) from the Pliocene of Eastern Africa.” This publication specifically created a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, that would explain Lucy’s morphology and give her an evolutionary narrative. Although Johanson and geologist Maurice Taieb had published general descriptions of the hominin material in 1976, AL 288-1 didn’t receive her scientific name until that Kirtlandia publication of 1978. With that publication, Lucy belonged to a species.
When Lucy was discovered, she joined a host of similarly curious fossils excavated in Tanzania, at the Laetoli site where Mary Leakey had been working for decades. Although history has made Lucy easily the most famous australopith, she is not, in fact, the type specimen for the species. (The type specimen for Australopithecus afarensis is actually LH-4, a fossilized adult mandible found in Tanzania at Laetoli.) Linking fossils from Ethiopia and Tanzania created a bit of a stir in the paleoanthropological community. First, it created a particularly intriguing argument that the distribution of this new species during the Plio-Pleistocene extended throughout East Africa; second, it created an implicit sociological link between Mary Leakey’s discoveries and Johanson’s. Regardless of what the type specimen was or where the geographical distribution of the afarensis species was, Lucy, rather than LH-4, became the cultural touchstone for talking about and making sense of human history in the Plio-Pleistocene.13
Australopithecus findings—discoveries before Lucy—made accurate reconstructions of any australopith species challenging. Whereas it was very difficult to imagine an entire living organism from one mandible or from some small bone fragment, a skeleton that was 40 percent complete—like Lucy’s—offered enough skeletal shape to be able to put a body with the fossil relatively easily. With parts of arms, legs, ribs, and crania, not to mention the left part of the pelvis, fragments of the jaws, teeth, and several vertebrae, it was easy to match fossil to body part. Not only did the different skeletal elements provide a very visual framework for the discovery, but the presence of so many previously undiscovered skeletal parts from the Plio-Pleistocene meant that, suddenly, researchers could ask questions about hominins’ niches in their environment. Since the fossil had arms and legs, it was possible to ask and answer questions of hominin locomotion—how these early hominin species would have moved. The recovered pelvis parts meant scientists could ask questions about sexual dimorphism in early human ancestors. With teeth and mandibles, paleoanthropologists and paleoecologists posed questions about the diet of Australopithecus afarensis and how the species would have been able to successfully consume resources from the environment.
When Lucy was announced to the scientific world as Australopithecus afarensis, she was the first new hominin species to be designated in fourteen years. Taxonomically, evolutionarily, and historically, the name carried a lot of clout. Australopithecus not only tied Lucy to Africa—similarly to how the Taung Child was tied to Africa through the name—but also established an evolutionary relationship with other fossil species. This new Australopithecus had to be ancestral to the genus Homo and related to the Taung species—this showed an evolutionary relationship between the fossil species. Even the species name afarensis carried some cultural provenience, tying the specimen to the Afar region where she was first discovered.
But Lucy has another moniker—her Ethiopian name, Dinkinesh. In Lucy’s Legacy, however, Johanson describes an exchange with his Ethiopian colleague at the Ministry of Culture, Bekele Negussie, in 1974. Negussie suggested that the fossil needed an Ethiopian name and proposed “Dinkinesh,” which roughly translates to “You are marvelous” from the Amharic language. “Dinkinesh” is Amharic, not Afar, creating an Ethiopian identity more broadly defined than even the regionalism implied by her scientific name, afarensis. In the original press conference about the 1974 field season, Lucy was introduced to the readers of the Ethiopian Herald as “Lucy,” not as Dinkinesh, and her Amharic nickname entered the oral and written history only in more recent years. In Lucy’s Legacy, Johanson offers the specimen another nickname in the Afar language—Heelomali—which he translates as “She is special.” But for most of Lucy’s life, she is just Lucy.
While Australopithecus afarensis electrified the scientific world, it was AL 288-1’s nickname and the Beatles story that locked her into the public’s consciousness. (A name, a story, were key, and certainly media conferences and television appearances did not hurt her celebrity development, either.) Nicknaming a fossil wasn’t unique to Lucy—the Old Man and the Taung Child are a testament to the phenomena—but in Lucy’s case a nickname was and still is particularly powerful. In Ethiopia, Lucy has lent her name and her cultural cachet to “numerous coffee shops, a rock band, a typing school, a fruit juice bar, and a political magazine. There is even an annual Lucy Cup soccer competition in Addis Ababa,” noted Johanson in Lucy’s Legacy, whose publication in 2009 coincided with Lucy’s U.S. tour. Lucy has become a mascot-like symbol for Ethiopia writ large—giving voice and identity for enduring antiquity of Ethiopian history and prehistory.
Billboard in downtown Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, illustrating the iconic role that Lucy (Dinkinesh) has played in defining national history. (L. Pyne)
For a fossil, names are everything: context, intrigue, history, cultural shorthand, science. The story of Lucy and her names is that of a cultural palimpsest—she is named, renamed, shaped, and reshaped by her various contexts. Her name—what she is called in what contexts and by whom—denotes the mores and complexities that surround her status as an icon.
And through her names, and their implied cachets and legacies, is how and why she has become the measuring stick by which all other fossils are compared. After-Lucy fossils are put in their “place” in scientific and popular cultures by back-sighting to that fossil. Fossils are older than Lucy. Fossils are younger than Lucy. A fossil species climbed trees—more or less so than Lucy. As a fossil, Lucy, then, is a suspended moment of evolutionary history where biology, psychology, and the fossil’s cultural significance balance as a triple point of meaning.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, it would be hard to find a better example of an image imbued with meaning than a fossil’s “official” portrait. Art historian Richard Brilliant argued that the fact that a portrait describes a real person infuses the image with more authenticity than a different kind of picture. “The very fact of the portrait’s allusion to an individual human being, actually existing outside the work, defines the function of the artwork in the world and constitutes that cause of its coming into being,” Brilliant wrote.14 To that end, fossils have several types of portraits and these pictures offer another strata of authenticity to their viewers—some representations are three-dimensional and diorama-like, while others are portraits or still-life depictions of the fossil.
The 1976 Nature publication that introduced Lucy as a fossil full of anatomical measurements also introduced Lucy’s iconic portrait. The article is accompanied by an image of the fossil carefully laid out, flat, in anatomical orientation, against a black backdrop. The figure is simply labeled “Partial skeleton (AL 288-1) from Hadar” and the portrait was reproduced again in the 1978 Kirtlandia article describing Australopithecus afarensis. Readers of the Nature article are left with a Rorschach-like inkblot—an image to read and let the
m interpret their own ideas about what the skeleton could be. But the image is really a piece of art in addition to being a figure in the journal article. This photograph quickly became one of the most iconic representations of the fossil. It’s almost as if the portrait is a panel in a triptych, with Lucy’s white bones illuminated and venerated against that black backdrop.
In later decades, other fossil discoveries would invoke AL 288-1 in photographs in which the white fossil bones are carefully laid out in similar anatomical position against a black backdrop. In 2009, for example, Science published “A New Kind of Ancestor: Ardipithecus Unveiled,” which was the first description of the 1994 fossil find Ardipithecus ramidus. The striking image of Ardipithecus that graced the cover of Science evoked the iconic images of AL 288-1: Ardipithecus laid out in anatomical array, photographed flatly against a black background. Just about every newly discovered fossil hominin species from Homo floresiensis to Australopithecus sediba to Homo naledi consciously or unconsciously invokes Lucy’s iconic portrait when scientists photograph their specimens in this way, appealing to Lucy’s established scientific and cultural legitimacy.
In the world of three-dimensional images, though, fossil expert and renowned contemporary paleoartist John Gurche describes the process of creating a reconstruction, particularly for a specimen that has as much social and cultural importance as Lucy. Giving Lucy a physical, tangible body means that an artist instills a form and offers a life force to a fossil—it’s a process that takes something static and creates a dynamic entity capable of moving, acting, and thinking. When audiences look at Gurche’s reconstructions, they might not realize that they are in fact seeing hundreds—thousands, really—of artistic decisions based on decades of exacting scientific research. Over three million years ago, Lucy’s appearance would have depended on her evolutionary story; in the twenty-first century, her form is a balance of artistic and scientific deductions. Providing the fossils’ audiences with a face—a sculpture, a portrait, a reconstruction—creates a narrative for the fossil. The photograph, sculpture, reconstruction, or diorama freezes that narrative and invites the viewer to step into the fossils’ life and to read its life story. Some of these reconstructions and visual images become culturally coded into the intellectual and public milieu and serve as important signifiers for cultural space. These pictures, these captured poses, are thus part of the public afterlife of fossils.
“As Lucy’s body took shape under my fingers, it became evident that it would not be like that of any creature alive today. There are both apelike and familiarly humanlike aspects of her anatomy, but her body is not identical to either,” Gurche mused, describing his work with Lucy. “The implication of the anatomical work is that, when reconstructing Lucy, she must be met on her own terms. I could not build a diminutive human form over this unique skeleton, nor could I build that of an ape. The process reveals a body unique to her kind. Strong. Capable. And a bit wary. This is how the figure of Lucy looked to my eyes when she was completed. She is climbing down from a tree and is just dropping into an upright pose. But she doesn’t do this casually. The ground is a dangerous place.”15
The reconstructed bodies and subsequent narratives of these ancestors have been stripped bare, back to the fossils’ casts. Instead of full diorama scenes, visitors see amazingly lifelike reconstructions of hominin faces, created by Gurche specifically for the Smithsonian. (Gurche’s work is brilliant; his hominin sculptures make most other attempts to put a body on a human ancestor look like a bedraggled extra from 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Gurche’s reconstructions stand alone, offering an element of singularity and disconnect as the hominins stand as individuals, devoid of a scene and devoid of a story.
Earlier reconstructions of australopithecines, particularly mid-twentieth-century dioramas that featured the Taung Child or other South African australopiths, catch a lot of flak from the scientific communities today for their outdated science and outmoded presentation—ideas or hypotheses that are no longer supported by the scientific establishment. On the surface, it’s easy to dismiss a diorama scene. We can say that our scientific understanding of toolmaking, social dynamics, and paleoenvironments has changed so much that we ought to dismiss these dioramas as vestiges of older, outdated science. It’s easy to argue that these dioramas are doing a disservice to museumgoers since the visitors will take away “wrong” information. It’s easy to take issue with the presentation of the reconstructions, saying that because the diorama stories are imprecise, it would be better to strip the scenes from the museum and display only fossil casts and their descriptions.16
These stories, however, humanize the australopithecines, and that’s a powerful thing. It makes the fossil record accessible to us as people, not just as scientists. It makes us more sympathetic, more empathetic, with fossils we’re seeing. Just as we’re ready to look to the brandishing club as a clear cultural motif—à la Kubrick’s 2001—we’re prepared to allow human ancestors narratives that we wouldn’t have in other circumstances. Putting the body on these fossils speaks to the way that we consciously or unconsciously make sense of these scenes and human evolution more generally. Thanks to her renown—her name-brand recognition, if you will—Lucy is an invaluable character in museum storyboards of human evolution, particularly in museums like the Smithsonian. At the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins, a three-dimensional reconstruction of Lucy greets visitors to the human evolution exhibit. She offers museumgoers a Virgil-like presence to their tour, guiding visitors through their own evolutionary story, similarly to how Sue the T. rex guides visitors through the Jurassic era at Chicago’s Field Museum. References to Lucy pop up in the explanatory text of the Hall’s exhibits, and countless other science and natural history museums utilize Lucy as a familiar character to guide visitors through humanity’s evolutionary narrative.
But the real Lucy isn’t on display in any museum, even in her home museum in Addis Ababa. Visitors to the National Museum of Ethiopia see casts of Lucy’s bones, while casts of other Ethiopian fossil hominin discoveries sit in glass cabinets nearby. Lucy’s real bones are carefully locked away in a laboratory vault a few buildings over. Other cultural, religious, and historical artifacts displayed in the National Museum demonstrate the deep, connecting ties between past and present, giving Lucy a series of contexts. So when Lucy—her real bones—came to the United States on a touring exhibit, that tour changed up the dynamic for “Lucy in museum exhibit.” Suddenly, audiences weren’t simply “learning about evolution” or “science” through replicas of famous fossils; museumgoers were queuing up to view a famous object—an icon.
Reconstructing australopithecine Lucy. French sculptor Elisabeth Daynes of the Daynes Studio, Paris, working on a reconstruction of the Lucy specimen Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy is shown walking on fossil footprints that were discovered in 1976 in Laetoli, Tanzania. (P. Plailly/E. Daynes/Science Photo Library)
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In 2007, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, in collaboration with the Ethiopian government and the U.S. State Department, launched a six-year museum tour of Lucy. The goal of the tour was simple. The hope was that a tour of the country’s best-known objet d’art, the iconic hominin, would raise awareness about Ethiopian culture and give the country an opportunity to show off its heritage. “It will put Ethiopia on the map as the cradle of mankind and of civilization,” announced Mohamoud Dirir, Ethiopia’s then minister of culture and tourism in 2006. The same way viewers might line up to view treasures from King Tut’s tomb or artifacts from Machu Picchu, an exhibit that showcased Lucy’s actual bones contextualized in broader Ethiopian history, transforming the museum experience into something truly exotic—it rarefied and highlighted how special such an unprecedented loan of fossil materials truly was. Science writer Ann Gibbons noted, “Ethiopian officials had high hopes that Lucy will do for Ethiopia what King Tut’s riches did for Egypt.”17
The possibility of displaying the actual Lucy churned up a huge amount of controversy. M
any were uneasy about letting such a famous, irreplaceable object leave its home country as part of a museum tour. Many museums—like the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, and even Lucy’s earlier home in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History—declined to host the exhibit citing concerns about possible damage to the bones. Kenyan paleoanthropologist and prominent activist Richard Leakey also objected to the transportation of an original fossil hominin outside of its country of origin. This, he and others claimed, violated a 1998 resolution established by the UNESCO-affiliated International Association for the Study of Human Paleontology that discourages the removal of fossil hominins from their place of discovery and emphasizes the use of replicas in museum displays. “If we start sending these fossils out of the country, Kenya and Ethiopia cease to be places where you can study fossils. It immediately changes the role of the museum as a place for scientific study,” said Leakey, former director of the National Museums of Kenya.18
Dirir countered Leakey’s position by arguing that Ethiopian officials thought that spreading the word about Lucy and their nation’s rich cultural heritage could help draw tourists to Ethiopia and change its image. “The money will go to museums, and just to museums,” said Dirir. “Just keeping fossils in Ethiopia will not develop science, museums, or the custodians of these fossils.” (In addition to building awareness about Ethiopian history and human evolution, Lucy’s trip to the United States would provide new data from the fossil. While in Texas, she was CT-scanned at the University of Texas, Austin—the scans [data] generated were transferred to the National Museum in Addis Ababa for future researchers.) Prominent Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged, then of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and 2001 discoverer of Selam (dubbed “Lucy’s Baby”), was skeptically unimpressed. “What Ethiopians are benefiting from this? I have not seen a document that clearly defines the role for the National Museum of Ethiopia,” he said in an interview with Nature in 2006. “I have never heard of any Ethiopian paleoanthropologist being involved. If money is being generated, it should be clear what percentage will go to Ethiopian science.”19