by Lydia Pyne
Once Lucy was returned to Ethiopia in 1980, via Cleveland, she went to the National Museum in Addis Ababa, kept under close lock and key. In the midst of newly emerging Ethiopian nationalism, a fossil of such iconic status was a particularly powerful cultural symbol about the longevity of Ethiopian history via its own prehistory. Researchers interested in working with any kind of Ethiopian fossil or archaeological materials were required to travel to the National Museum for their studies; scientists who wanted to study Lucy needed to have the approval of the museum and fossil keepers and then would come study, caliper, and measure Lucy on her own turf, in a sort of data-driven pilgrimage.
Fast-forward almost thirty-five years. Texan congressman Mickey Leland had developed a strong rapport with various ministers in Ethiopia through his work with food and humanitarian agencies, working to get more financial resources into the country. Having traveled extensively there throughout the 1980s, Congressman Leland had a well-established reputation within the Ethiopian community. After his death in a tragic plane crash (while on a mission to alleviate the severe famine that affected Ethiopia in 1989), consul generals from Ethiopia wanted to find a way of commemorating his work and legacy, even decades later. They offered a tour of their most well-known icon—a tour of the fossil that hadn’t left the museum after it was originally returned to the institution in the early 1980s and the fossil that was, perhaps, the most well known within the popular and scientific communities. Before the tour began, in 2007, there were years worth of negotiations and logistics to be addressed.20
In 2003, Dr. Dirk Van Tuerenhout received an unexpected phone call. As curator of anthropology for the Houston Museum of Natural Science, he was accustomed to fielding questions about the market potential for particular exhibits, coordinating the display of rare and privately owned artifacts with odd bequests and requests within the museum. Throughout his career, Van Tuerenhout has helped curate an incredible variety of exhibits—including The Dead Sea Scrolls (2004), Mummy: The Inside Story (2005), Secrets of the Silk Road (2010), The Cave Paintings of Lascaux (2013–2014), and Magna Carta (2014). When Van Tuerenhout picked up the phone one day over lunch, he was sure that he was going to field some relatively wingnut inquiry about some recent exhibit that the museum had run. Instead, he was floored by the conversation.21
The woman on the other end of the phone introduced herself as from the Texas office of tourism. The tourism official asked if the Houston Museum of Natural Science organized any archaeology exhibits, and if so, did people come from far enough away to require a hotel stay. Van Tuerenhout politely answered affirmatively to both questions. He was, however, a bit stymied by the question of “How many people traveled to the museum and then stayed the night at a hotel in Houston?” He said he had no idea and then, in turn, asked what all of these questions were about. The tourism official replied that there was the possibility of an exhibit about Ethiopia coming to Houston, Texas, and that “Ms. Lucy was going to be part of it.”
It would be hard to find an anthropologist worth his salt that wouldn’t make the connection between “Ms. Lucy” and the iconic fossil hominin, and Van Tuerenhout chuckles at the memory. That conversation was the beginning of a long partnership between the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the National Museum of Ethiopia as Van Tuerenhout and others worked to organize the display of Lucy and other Ethiopian artifacts.22
Negotiating Lucy’s twenty-first-century tour was no small task. Curators, scientists, art historians, politicians, and various Ethiopian groups all had different, sometimes vying, interests in seeing whether the exhibit would come to fruition and if so what shape it might take. Meetings between American and Ethiopian museums to negotiate the exhibit and which artifacts would travel with Lucy went on for months. Even before the question of which religious artifacts, triptychs, or other icons would be allowed to leave the National Museum, serious questions were raised by the Ethiopian Orthodox bishops about how artifacts would be treated while on loan and about their safe return. More than triptychs or processional crosses, however, most of the discussion about loaning artifacts centered on the safe return of Lucy and concerns about damage to or loss of the fossil. Losing Lucy would mean losing a crucial part of Ethiopia’s modern history and prehistory.
In many ways, it would seem that their concerns hinged, however, on understanding what kind of object Lucy was—or is. Defining the kind of object Lucy was would translate to how museums and audiences ought to view her, but it also meant that different audiences contributed different types of expertise in creating the “Lucy” that would be on exhibit—understanding how a scientific object like a fossil can draw from the social cachet that something like a religious icon carries. And certainly, within the Orthodox Coptic tradition in Ethiopia, icons have a specific place and role. Painted in bold, simple colors with heavily accented eyes, icons serve as religious reminders, sure. They also serve as cultural testimonies—an affirmation of narrative and cultural place. Characterized by biblical scenes that show classic tropes of religious iconography—the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Ascension—the icons are often painted as parts of a series or as triptychs. In addition to scenes from the life of Christ, we see other common motifs, like Saint George and the dragon. The paintings are characterized by removing the person (or the scene) from any kind of specific environment or context.23
However, this goes beyond a simple observation that religious tropes permeate specific cultural contexts. Thinking about Lucy in terms of her association with Coptic iconography deepens her cultural role and the explanatory power she wields. As an icon herself, she becomes a character acting out a moral universe and a moral philosophy as part of Ethiopia’s national story. Her story is one of a fossil icon’s ascension, and this icon—“Dinkinesh” in Amharic or “Lucy” in the popular vernacular—translates well beyond its simple scientific context.
Art and curatorial worlds have asked and answered the question of an artifact’s objectness over and over; these objects are insured and shipped around the world for exhibits and tours. Unlike natural history exhibits that show casts of fossil bones, no art museum is going to advertise showing a copy of a Picasso or a faux Matisse. There’s an implied authenticity about the objects in the art world on display in museums that doesn’t seem to necessarily hold true for paleoanthropology exhibits. If the objection was that Lucy was a rare object, there are means and methods for shipping and displaying rare and irreplaceable items. But all objects—overtly scientific or not—act as cultural signs and symbols that tap into our senses and transfer information from objects to us, communicating the intended meaning wrapped up in those objects.
The museums that did opt to host the Lucy and Ethiopian exhibit—like the Pacific Science Center in Seattle or the Houston Museum of Natural Science—were able to offer their audiences what Van Tuerenhout argued was a completely unique and important educational opportunity. (In an interview with the New York Times, Joel Bartsch, the president of the Houston Museum, estimated that in the year that Lucy was on exhibit in Houston, she drew approximately 210,000 visitors. That’s a huge number of museumgoers checking out Ethiopian history, prehistory, and fossil history.)24 Casts, reconstructions, and images of famous fossils help us to become aware of scientific conversations and the “doing” of paleoanthropology, to say nothing of the power of authenticity. Anthropologist Kristi Lewton and I had the same reaction upon seeing the Taung Child in person; people have a never-ending desire to figure out who “really” perpetrated the Piltdown Hoax, or to discover the “real” Peking Man fossils. These impressions—replicas, photographs, pieces of scientific ephemera—are not, however, the same as seeing The Real Fossil.
Media advertising for Lucy’s Legacy exhibit, 2007. (Image courtesy of Houston Museum of Natural Science)
Media advertising for Lucy’s Legacy exhibit, 2007. (Image courtesy of Houston Museum of Natural Science)
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Every exhibit is made up of hundreds—thousand
s—of choices, both small and large. Choices about what to exhibit where, and how, with these choices leading to other decisions about how objects ought to be transported, stored, and curated before, during, and after an exhibit—Lucy’s Legacy was no different.
The curatorial team included Dr. Nancy Odegaard, the head of preservation at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, as well as Ronald Harvey and Dr. Vicki Cassman. This team orchestrated the incredible logistics that surrounded Lucy’s exhibit. “As a conservator, I find myself as an advocate for the object,” Odegaard commented. “Once the decision is made that an object will travel, I work through the potential problems and balance the risks. But first and foremost, I am an advocate for the objects, since they cannot speak for themselves.”25 For the thousands of visitors who saw Lucy over her six-year exhibit, what they saw, in reality, was the result of thousands of decisions that the curatorial team had made long before Lucy ever left Ethiopia.
A paleoanthropologist might read a fossil species’ evolutionary history through a fossil, but a curator can read a cultural history of that fossil in the way that the fossil has been treated postexcavation. These curators are not “artifact technicians,” but experts whose knowledge means that the fossils can be studied by scientists and seen in museums. They know what type of glue can hold a fossil together and which will cause yellowing and deterioration. They know how to inventory and store artifacts appropriately. “We can see changes on bone and fossil,” Odegaard observed. “As a conservator, I can see a cultural history written on the fossil, where glue might be discolored or a museum number has worn off. Over time, even measuring a fossil with calipers will cause wear and tear on the bone.”26
Odegaard, Cassman, and Harvey traveled to Ethiopia to see Lucy in the National Museum so they would have a better sense of what would be required to move her. The curators inventoried the fossil’s skeleton and took stock of how she was then cataloged in the museum. They built the travel case, using casts of Lucy to see how everything would fit together and how it would be taken out, going through customs and at the different museums. “Lucy rode in the first-class section of the plane, in the overhead luggage compartment, with her seventy-six fossil elements divided between two Pelican cases that would have floated if, god forbid, the plane crashed in the ocean,” Ron Harvey said.27
Odegaard designed and constructed little custom plastic ziplock baggies for each of Lucy’s bone fragments, so that no one would have to touch the fossil itself if The Case was opened for a customs inspection. (“It was definitely ‘The Case,’” Odegaard laughed. “The Case, with capital letters.”) Every bone piece had a photo of the front and back of it attached to its corresponding baggie. “This system meant that it was immediately obvious if something was missing or if something was amiss,” Odegaard recalled. “The only person who would actually touch the fossil was Alemu Admassu, a curator at the National Museum. The only people in the room with conservator Ron Harvey when she was being boxed and unboxed were Alemu and the director of the museum. Limiting the number of people in contact with the fossil was a way of limiting the potential for damage.”28 (In July 2015, President Barack Obama met Lucy during his tour of East Africa, which included a stop in Ethiopia. Both President Obama and the fossil received a motorcade through the city. Before a state dinner at Ethiopia’s National Palace, Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged gave an informal, impromptu demonstration of Lucy’s anatomy and encouraged President Obama to touch the fossil. When some colleagues questioned this, Alemseged was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “Extraordinary people have extraordinary access.”)29
Odegaard, Harvey, and Cassman went through several dry runs with the case, loading and unloading replica casts, trying to find any lingering issues with their transportation system, and seeking ways to reduce the potential for damage to the fossil. Harvey took before-and-after photos of Lucy at every museum stop, and those photos were used to assess the fossil when she was returned to Ethiopia. “There was no damage at all during her tour,” Odegaard noted. “It felt unprecedented.”30
In March 2007, I saw Lucy in her Legacy exhibit in Houston and it was unlike any paleoexhibit that I had ever seen. Most traditional fossil exhibits are large, brightly lit halls, places where families are crammed around dioramas and reconstructions, where docents shout to make themselves heard over jubilant school groups. The ambience surrounding Lucy was very different—the room with her bones had a different vibe from the rest of the museum and even a different feeling from the adjacent brightly lit rooms filled with Ethiopian artifacts. Where other parts of the museum were loud and boisterous, the darkened room where Lucy lay felt very subdued and reverent. The public filed past the fossil much as if attending a wake, with Lucy laid out prone on a table in anatomical configuration. Perhaps a more apt allusion would be that the visitors were filing past a religious relic—the darkened room, the solemnity of the display, and the unlifelike pose of the fossil created an atmosphere that suggested Lucy’s life was different from the articulated mammoths and dinosaurs two exhibit halls over, which were fossil replica skeletons arranged midmotion. The exhibit highlighted the complexities of an iconic celebrity fossil and the difficulties of moving her between audiences. The tour was an intricate pilgrimage for both the public and the fossil; countless scientists, paleoenthusiasts, and museumgoers trekked to hosting museums for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the fossil.
In other museums of science, where replica casts of Lucy are traditionally displayed in motion against painted environmental backdrops, the solemn setting in the Houston museum resembled a medieval reliquary for hominin ancestry. Here, Lucy intermixed with Coptic Christian crosses and paintings (plus stone tools and paleomagnetism rock samples from East Africa’s Rift Valley) as a latter-day icon—a mixture of science, culture, and emotion.
“As a scientist, I am treading dangerous ground by speaking of Lucy in ‘mythic’ terms. Lucy’s real significance, of course, is not to be found in symbol; it rests in whatever empirical evidence she provides for the understanding of the process of evolution, specifically, the evolutionary origins of the human species,” Donald Johanson offered in his 1990 bestseller, Lucy’s Child.31 But according to nineteenth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, signs and symbols signify cultural intent and meaning. We read these societal clues almost as involuntarily as we breathe; they’re a language of making sense of our surrounding material culture, and it’s practically impossible not to draw from our societal clues to interpret what we’re internalizing.32
Houston Museum of Natural Science gift store swag from Lucy’s Legacy exhibit, 2007. (L. Pyne. Image courtesy of Houston Museum of Natural Science)
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Ever since her discovery, just about all the media coverage of any other fossil discovery uses Lucy as a comparative point. New fossils are ancestors that Lucy shares with us or not. A fossil like Selam—a three-year-old juvenile australopithecine discovered by Zeresenay Alemseged in 2001—has been dubbed “Lucy’s Baby,” lending a cultural familiarity to Selam’s relatively recent fossil discovery (published in 2006). Popular science books like Lucy Long Ago, Lucy’s Child, From Lucy to Language, and Lucy’s Legacy invoke power (aside from alliteration) in their appeal to their audience understanding and knowing Lucy as a cultural sign and symbol.
Conservator Ron Harvey spent six years as part of Lucy’s entourage as she traveled from one museum to another. “She really is the grande dame of science,” he reflected. “I think she connects with humanity on a level that I haven’t seen with any other artifact.”33 Kristi Lewton pointed out to me that Lucy is a useful way to explain her research to nonspecialists, and she knew several other anthropologists who did the same. We say to people, “We study the evolution of hands, feet, locomotion, pelvis, etc. You’ve heard of Lucy? Well, Lucy did or had x and we, as Homo sapiens, have y.”34
The story—the iconography—of Lucy has coalesced and is told and retold. The prominent casting company Bone C
lones noted that its sales of Lucy casts have held steady over the last decade, due in no small part to her draw in an educational context. “Lucy had become iconic with the public and so schools wanted to teach anthropology using it as an example. The public has known and thought of Lucy as the ‘mother’ of all modern humans. Of course, it is an exaggeration but still a great teaching tool.”35
Could there be another Lucy? Could there be a fossil that carries the same cachet that she does? Yes and no. Yes, as more and more fossils are found and enter the cultural vernacular from their scientific publications, it’s possible that another fossil could come to have the same nationalistic, scientific, and iconic status that Lucy currently enjoys. Lucy—like all objects—is a product of her various contexts. Part of what propelled her to such iconic levels were the times and places that contribute to her life and afterlife; these various contexts simply can’t be manufactured, and the time it takes for the fossils to come to life simply can’t be shortchanged. There won’t—there can’t—be another Lucy. But that can’t and won’t stop other fossils from trying.
Portrait of LB1, Homo floresiensis.
(William Jungers. Used with permission)
CHAPTER SIX
THE PRECIOUS: FLO’S LIFE AS A HOBBIT
In the early morning we went to the site, and when we arrived in the cave, I didn’t say a thing because both my mind and heart couldn’t handle this incredible moment,” archaeologist Dr. Thomas Sutikna described, recalling the 2003 field season at Liang Bua on the island of Flores, Indonesia.1 After months of excavations and years in planning, the team had finally made a fantastic fossil discovery—one that completely shocked the world of paleoanthropology. They had unearthed a truly amazing humanlike fossil, a bizarre specimen that immediately piqued a plethora of scientific disputes that have lasted over a decade. Although the small, three-foot-tall adult hominin was named Homo floresiensis in scientific literature and christened “Flo” by the research teams, she is best known to the rest of the world as the real-life hominin hobbit.