LOOKING FOR HUMAN ORIGINS

Lucy and the Search for Earliest Man

In the early 1970s, if you had asked most Americans who the reigning king of "early man" studies was, they almost certainly would have said Richard Leakey, or perhaps his father, Louis Leakey. Both were made famous by National Geographic television specials celebrating their discoveries of fossil remains of large-brained tool users in East Africa. But much of that changed in 1974, when a team led by American Don Johanson and Frenchman Maurice Taieb reported that they had found a three-million-year-old hominid (humanlike) skeleton in Afar, Ethiopia. The fossil was older and more complete than any hominid ever found before. The shape of the pelvis showed it to be female, while the knee joint and thigh revealed that she walked upright. She was surprisingly short, less than four feet tall. Whimsically, the English members of the team named her Lucy, for the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Her Swahili name was more respectful: Denkanesh, meaning "you are wonderful."

Debates

Initially Johanson argued that her upright stature and humanlike features made Lucy a member of the genus Homo, placing her in the same classification as modern humans and Leakey's more modern fossils. After considerable debate, anthropologists assigned her to the genus Australopithecus. The assignment meant that both Leakey and Johanson could now claim they had found the remains of the earliest man. However, Leakey believed Australopithecus was a branch of the evolutionary tree that had died out, while Johanson thought it was an ancestor of modern humans. Further discoveries intensified the disagreement between the two men. In 1975 Johanson's team found a large group of 3.7-million-year-old hominid fossils together, representing at least thirteen individuals, including an infant and several juveniles. They became known as the "first family." Taken together, along with a skull found in Tanzania by Mary Leakey, Richard's mother, Johanson and his collaborators argued that they had found a new species, and they called it Australopithecus afarensis.

Man the Hunter

If it seems strange that the star specimen of early man should be female, it is. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s, as interest in questions of human evolution increased sharply, so, too, did the conviction that males were the engine of the train of human evolution. Men hunt, the argument went, and hunting requires tools, intelligence, and an erect stature. Women stayed home with the babies. Thus it was men's activities that caused human evolution. Lucy, with her personable name (and one of the few early fossils to have any identifiable sex-specific characteristics), may have marked the beginning of the end of the view that the important qualities of early man were male.

Woman the Gatherer

In 1971 Sally Linton published a paper called Woman the Gatherer. Linton, and other female anthropologists after her, suggested that what we know from studying primates and subsistence societies is that hunting is relatively unimportant. It supplies a relatively small portion of the food for a community. Rather, it is the generally female activity of gathering plants, roots, and berries and sharing them with their offspring that is the significant feature of food accumulation. Thus she thought the first tools were probably containers for carrying infants and the material gathered. Few champions of the "man the hunter" thesis took notice of Linton's paper at the time, but by the end of the decade her arguments had gained a secure foothold in beliefs about human evolution. Among other things, it was difficult to find ways that the earliest tools found—simple choppers and hand axes—could have been used for hunting. While there was little agreement over a more important role for women in the process, most accepted that gathering and other women's work were significant in early human survival.

WHEN FIRST I SIGHTED LUCY

It was November 24, 1974, and the sun stood scorchingly overhead. I had intended to devote this Sunday morning to bringing my field notes up-to-date. But Tom had persuaded me to relocate a spot where we had collected fossil animal bones the year before. We spent some time surveying, gathered up what bones we found, and started back toward the Land-Rover. As we walked, I glanced over my shoulder—and there on the ground I saw a fragment of an arm bone.

My pulse was quickening. Although the bone was very small, it lacked the characteristic bony flange of a monkey. Suddenly I found myself saying, "It's hominid!"

Something else caught my eye. "Do you suppose it belongs with those skull fragments?" It was high noon that memorable day when the realization struck us both that we might have found a skeleton. An extraordinary skeleton.

We looked up the slope. There incredibly, lay a multitude of bone fragments—a nearly complete lower jaw, a thigh bone, arm bones, ribs, vertebrae, and more! The searing heat was forgotten. Tom and I yelled, hugged each other, and danced, mad as any Englishmen in the midday sun.

Source:

Donald C. Johanson, "Ethiopia Yields First 'Family' of Early Man," National Geographic, 150 (December 1976): 790-811.

Sources:

Linda Marie Fedigan, "The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution," Annual Review of Anthropology, 15 (1986): 25 66;

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989);

Donald C. Johanson, "Ethiopia Yields First 'Family' of Early Man," National Geographic, 150 (December 1976): 790-811;

"Puzzling Out Man's Ascent," Time (2 November 1977): 64-78;

John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man (New York: Penguin, 1988).