In the Aug. 21 edition of eFlyer, we have a story about the arrival of Lucy — the 3.5-million-year-old skeleton of what is perhaps an early ancestor — at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. I was fascinated by the find when it first was announced, and pulled out the book from my library; it’s called Lucy, The Beginnings of Humankind, by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey. Johanson was the anthropologist who found her, in Ethiopia in 1974. The book is still in print, although the idea that she might have been a direct ancestor has been shown to be a bit less likely than was originally thought.

A lot of anthropologists and Ethiopians are less than thrilled that Lucy is being sent on a six-year tour of mostly American museums. One of the reasons is that the Ethiopian people have been only allowed to see her twice. There’s a Lucy exhibit at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in Addis Ababa, but it’s a replica–her bones were considered too fragile for constant public display. The Ethiopian government decided to send the real Lucy on tour in order to raise money to improve existing museums in Ethiopia and build new ones.

The Smithsonian has been one of the vocal opponents of the tour, worrying about her fragility, so the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. won’t be on the tour schedule. She is expected to “visit” New York, Denver and Chicago as well as other cities, but after Houston the only tentatively scheduled exhibit is at The Field Museum in Chicago from November 2009 through April 2010.

One of the cool things about Lucy is how much of her was found. Johanson discovered 40 percent of her fossilized skeleton, but because different bones were found for her left and right sides, it was possible to reconstruct 70 percent of her skeleton, giving a really good idea of the whole picture. Lucy stood about 3 feet tall, walked upright, and was certainly hominid, although her branch of the family tree–Australopithecus afarensis, to be precise–may have come to a dead end.

 By the way, thank the Beatles for her name. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was playing in the archaeologists’ camp the night she was found. As the oldest and most complete hominid skeleton ever discovered, she really captured the public imagination. She even inspired a 1999 ballet.

Let’s hope she’s up for her travels, and is treated with the reverence she deserves.

-Mary Hunt, Editor, eFlyer