Some 35 years after she was discovered, Lucy, everyone’s favorite Australopithecus, is making her New York City debut. Considered to be the oldest and most complete specimen of Australopithecus afarensis (an early ancestor of humans), and hailed by the exhibition’s catalogue as the “world’s most famous fossil,” Lucy is on display through October at the Discovery Times Square Exhibition in Midtown.
The show, which is half about Lucy and half about Ethiopia’s cultural history, comes after long negotiation between the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the National Museum of Ethiopia, which owns the Lucy skeleton. Donald Johanson, the anthropologist who discovered Lucy, was in attendance last Tuesday, helping his little girl (she’s about three and a half feet tall) come out into society.
The first room in the exhibition contains display cases with Ethiopian artifacts from the past three millennia. In human evolutionary terms, that’s so recent it’s practically irrelevant. But according to NME director Mamitu Yilma, Ethiopian history is human history. The layout of the exhibition supports the theory that the human race began in what is now Ethiopia, positing that an understanding of Ethiopian culture is necessary for an understanding of human evolution. Lucy is, after all, Ethiopian, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
In the passageway to the Lucy room, speakers blare the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the song after which Lucy was named. Lucy herself is in a low black case—an open casket of sorts—with her bones arranged according to skeletal convention. Surrounding her is a mural depicting human evolution, in which time is represented spatially, with apes becoming Neanderthals becoming modern humans, or homo sapiens sapiens.
While posing for pictures with family and friends on Tuesday, Johanson gave an informal and peripatetic lecture on Lucy, saying, for instance, that she probably died in the jaws of a crocodile (her pelvis bears a tooth puncture). Lucy’s scientific significance, further, is considerable. She offers strong evidence that hominids became bipedal before they developed intelligent brains. In other words, that girl can walk, but she’s not the sharpest spear in the cave.
