‘Lucy’s Legacy’: Little Lucy brings Ethiopian artifacts

Published 1:42 pm Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Make no bones about it, Seattle is hosting a very famous relative of ours.

Lucy, the most well-known skeleton in the world, will be on display through March 8 at Pacific Science Center, as part of “Lucy’s Legacy.”

The exhibit is on an expected six-year tour arranged through a partnership between the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ethiopia, and it arrived here following an international controversy.

When the Houston museum announced the tour in 2006, many scientists objected, saying the fossils were too valuable to transport, the possibility of damage too great. The Smithsonian Institution, among others, refused to host the exhibit.

But other scientists argued that viewing the bones could inspire greater study and understanding of evolution. Some pointed out that rare objects regularly travel to museums. Donald Johanson, who discovered Lucy in 1974 with Tom Gray, endorsed the tour.

Clearly, Pacific Science Center sided with Johanson. It has dedicated about 800,000 square feet to the exhibit, expanding “Lucy’s Legacy” by about 300,000 square feet from its prior stay in Houston. The center’s president, Bryce Seidl, said the museum was interested in hosting Lucy as soon as the tour was announced.

The final show includes sections about the development of humans, contemporary science and the history of Ethiopia, where Lucy was discovered.

“That’s not something you can do from a photograph or from a replica,” Seidl said. “So to get the real thing the first time on the world tour was special.”

Lucy belongs to a species of hominid, or upright-walking primates, called Australopithecus afarensis. Many believe her A. afarensis, walking upright on two legs, represents one of the earliest ancestors of humankind. Still, Lucy looks a bit more monkey than man. One model in the exhibit reconstructs her theorized appearance. She stands about 3½ feet tall and her face looks like a chimpanzee.

Lucy earned her English name shortly after she was discovered. Johanson’s team celebrated with an all-night party, someone blasted the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” and Lucy had a name. In Ethiopia, however, she bears the name Dinknesh, or Wonderful Thing.

That more lyrical name is also more accurate. Lucy is a wonder. Her bones date back 3.18 million years, and her skeleton, about 40 percent complete, represents one of the best preserved specimens of her kind.

Dirk Van Tuerenhout, curator of anthropology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, said seeing Lucy’s bones — fragments of a skull, legs, arms and chest — still gives him chills.

“It’s serendipity, really, that her bones were preserved,” he said.

While Lucy is the star in Seattle, much of her exhibit focuses on Ethiopia’s cultural history.

Before viewing the skeleton, visitors walk past silver necklaces, ornate Christian crosses and leather-bound Qurans from Ethiopia. Crude tools illustrate the ingenuity of early civilizations, while a letter to Queen Victoria demonstrates the impoverished nation’s fierce independence — the country almost entirely avoided colonial rule.

In the end, as a lost link, Lucy helps bring to light the connections Ethiopia has to the Evergreen State.

“There are all kinds of links that one can make between concepts that we are familiar with and Ethiopia,” Van Tuerenhout said. “It is perhaps the link we are not familiar with.”

Reporter Andy Rathbun: 425-339-3455 or arathbun@heraldnet.com.