The Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University is celebrating this year as a ‘Year of Human Origins’ because 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of ‘Lucy’. The discussions on human origins and Lucy provokes one to seriously think about human life and where we come from.
Who is Lucy? What does she have to do with the idea of human origins?
When then US President Barack Obama visited Ethiopia in 2015 and had a chance to see the Lucy skeleton in the museum, The Guardian reported it as Obama meets Lucy, the grandmother of humanity. The paleo-anthropologist giving him the tour explained that all human beings are connected to Lucy, “even Donald Trump”.
Lucy is a unique specimen which provides a tangible proof for Charles Darwin’s thesis on human evolution, who argued that humans are “descended from some less highly organised form”, probably from “a hairy, tailed quadruped” living on trees. In his theory of evolution, Darwin had proposed that humans and African apes might share a common ancestry.
On November 24, 1974 at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia, Donald Johanson and his team found several fragments of bones: a forearm bone, skull, a femur (thigh bone), some ribs, a pelvis and the lower jaw. It took a week to recover 40% of a single hominid skeleton. This rather incomplete skeleton for paleoanthropologists because of its rarity is considered an extraordinarily complete skeleton. Using several methods of dating it was situated at around 3.18 million years old. In life it would have stood about three-and-a-half feet tall, and weighed about 27 to 30 kg. Through a comparison of size from other sexually dimorphic fossils from Hadar, it was argued that the skeleton is of a female. The arrangement of bones suggested bipedality and led one to believe that it belongs to hominids species. Hominids are the species after human/African ape ancestral split which includes varied species, sapiens being only one of them. Thus the importance of Lucy is her being the common ancestor to a group of species that all died out (different varieties of hominins), but also an ancestor to the lineage that ultimately led to us (homo sapiens).
Following Darwin’s understanding and these discoveries, over the past few years, academics and social scientists all over the world have been inspired by the idea of decentering our understanding of history and society from the human species. Efforts have been made in trying to expand our understanding of the world as a connected ecosystem where us humans are pretty late entrants and our existence can only make sense in relationship to other species and ecological factors. In this vein, this year is important.
Why it is important to highlight Lucy’s provenance, and a few other questions
For most of the modestly educated people in our country, the name ‘Ethiopia’ would hardly ring a bell. If you are a part of the tip of the iceberg that can afford private school where general knowledge books published by Oxford or Orient Longman are prescribed, it is more likely that you would be familiar with the country which was erstwhile Abyssinia. If you are further up in the miniscule tip and like to call yourself a connoisseur of coffee, you might be familiar with Ethiopia as the land where coffee originated. The chances that we could locate Ethiopia correctly on the world map are low. For a large section of our society, Ethiopia specifically, and the African continent generally, are either objects of indifference or of disdain, not only for the uninitiated but even for those who study the world, its history, geography or polity. And while we live in a world, and a nation, that has historically been disturbingly obsessed with an association with fairness of skin, (global) northern-ness of location and aryan-ity of race, the historical legacy of the A.L. 288 (site in Ethiopia where Lucy’s skeletons were found) of the Ethiopian Afar beckons us to really take a hard look at our connected roots.
From the single ulna to a partial hominid, Lucy, as she is commonly known, became the woman who shook up man’s family tree in 1974. The discovery by Donald Johanson and his doctoral student Tom Gray, came on a dusty, warm November afternoon which was marked by the routine of tedious paperwork, quacking guinea fowls and a Land Rover that marked the Ethiopian territory with an unmistakable American presence. And the fragments of our long lost forebear having been discovered, the immensity of the find having kicked in, it was the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a Sony tape deck that threw up the name Lucy.
Johanson, in his story of that day, reminisces that he smiled “politely” at this naming suggested by his girlfriend Pamela Alderman. And while he felt discomfort at this anglophonic christening of the earliest “spokeswoman” of human history, and while Bekele Negussie, the director general of the Ministry of Culture of Ethiopia, suggested that this ancient woman be named per the geographical location of her discovery, the name Lucy caught on. It was this name that appeared in popular media including crossword puzzles, cartoons and innumerable documentaries. Interestingly, it also happened to be the name which caught on in the popular parlance in Africa. As Johanson mentions in his book Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, everything from African Red Bush Tazo Tea bags to coffee shops, rock bands, magazines as well as an entire soccer tournament were found named after our very own Lucy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. Not only Ethiopia, but also the US seems to be amply replete with coffee shops and cafes named after Lucy. And while the name caught the imagination not only of the anglophones but of interested peoples all over the world, and while the Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins celebrates the 50 year anniversary of the discovery of Lucy with a very glorious line-up of public talks and conversations, the celebration should be more than one institution’s and should be a moment of collective reflection and scrutiny across the world.
The momentousness of the discovery of Lucy, a cardinal juncture that pegged firmly our existence in the scientific idea of evolution, cannot and must not be undermined. Lucy stands tall (figuratively alone!) as a testament to the importance and relevance of evidence-based research and intellectual rigour which historians have been trying to preserve against right-wing, extremist ideas of creationism being peddled across the world at this juncture. The knowledge about Lucy must not be stored in crypts or museums alone, or must not be a joyous moment for a certain community of intellectuals in the United States alone. Lucy’s identity is imprinted upon our survival as human beings even 3.2 million years after her demise, and not only of our survival but of our eventual common ancestry. While racial discriminations and anti-blackness mark the global canvas, and more so in our country where terms like “habshi” are promptly used, anti-blackness is rampant and racism is literally found in all shapes, sizes and colours, the very knowledge of a common ancestry going back to Africa is not only educative but also remarkably humbling. In a time when WhatsApp forwards have become the be all and end all of information gathering for the majority of this country, to disseminate knowledge about our connected roots and evidence-based past narratives is nothing if not imperative.
Lucy’s 50th anniversary is an opportunity to reflect and reorganise, especially for the community of historians. While it is absolutely justified to celebrate this occasion and to congratulate the University of Arizona and Johanson for their contribution to the field, some concerns remain, some questions must worry us – why is Africa, Ethiopia, despite being our most likely common ancestral land, such a distant name for us? Why, even for the elites of our society, is Arizona more familiar than Ethiopia? Why is our education system not inclusive of political actors who belong to the third world? How do we make Lucy a more familiar name with the public? In what register do we remember people like Ali Axinum, the local guide who led the American archaeologists through the ever changing sands of Africa, who are are lost from the records? And most importantly, how do we bring back the name Dinkinesh, the Ethiopian name for Lucy which meant “you are marvellous”?
In India, the decision to delete the evolution theory of Darwin from the NCERT textbooks is to also deprive ourselves and future generations of this breakthrough in understanding our past. Discussing and celebrating Lucy’s discovery is to counter rampant anti-intellectualism and to reassert the spirit of scientificity in our nation.
Lucy reminds us that Ethiopia and adjacent regions are the sites of evolutionary drama out of which our human species emerged and spread at different places at different points in time. Archaeologists and historians have meticulously researched to argue that historically in the deep past our species migrated out of Africa in different directions. One such branch reached India as well. The study of old DNAs too have proved such migratory patterns. This simple fact of our common link to Africa silences all whining and shouting of pseudo-nationalists who keep announcing later migrants to the land as outsiders.
The socio-political questions and conversations that Lucy provokes reach far beyond the distant past. They are conversations that, like all historical discoveries, affect our present. Lucy and our relationship with her is a key to gaining perspective on how to live in a highly fractured and war-torn world today. Our knowledge of the deep past makes us marvel at our common fate as a part of a larger system of existence and erosion, both in the past and in the future.
In the end we would like to reassert the vastness and commonness of the past which is often humbling. We find universality in it. A universality which offers us possibilities as far reaching as slowly merging into the world of other animals. We become them. As we move into the deep past, our many anthropocentric endogamy(ies) end in Claude Levi Strausse’s ‘true endogamy of human species’, which is merely a ‘refusal to recognise the possibility of marriage beyond the limits of the human community’. Theoretically, of course. And if we go further back in the past we end up close to apes. Such a synergistic concept, connecting us to intra and inter species immediately disturbs our deeply entrenched ideas of caste, race, gendered and other segregations.
Chandrabhan P. Yadav teaches history at National Law School of India University and Surbhi Vatsa is a Research Scholar at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
