On November 24, 1974 after a long hot morning of surveying for fossils, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray made the discovery of a lifetime. Searching in a maze of ravines at Hadar in northern Ethiopia, Johanson spotted a tiny fragment of arm bone on the ground that he quickly identified as a hominid – an ancestral member of the family of humans. Looking up the slope, he saw a skull bone, then a femur, some ribs, a pelvis and the lower jaw.

After extensive screening and sorting, the team unearthed 47 bones of a skeleton - nearly 40% of a hominid that had lived approximately 3.2 million years ago. Its small size and the shape of its pelvis identified the skeleton as female. In life, she would have stood approximately 3.5 feet tall and weighed between 60 to 65 pounds. To this day, Lucy remains the oldest and most complete adult human ancestor fully retrieved from African soil.

Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia

By Groum Abate

An inspired name
Technically, she was known as AL-288. But during the celebration on the night of her discovery, the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was played over and over. Someone suggested she be named Lucy and the name stuck. The Ethiopian people refer to her as “Dinkenesh,” an Amharic language term meaning “You are beautiful.”
An entirely new species

The discovery of Lucy yielded an entirely new species of human ancestor, known as Australopithecus afarensis, or “southern ape of Afar,” after the region of Ethiopia where the bones were found. To determine if a fossil represents a new species, paleoanthropologists compare it to known samples, noting the similarities and differences. Then, using knowledge of evolutionary processes as well as anatomy and biology, it is determined whether the differences are significant enough to distinguish a new species.

How do we know she was a she?
The fossil known as Lucy was determined to be female based on several traits:
§Lucy’s small size compared to other representatives of the same species.
§The shape of her pelvis compared to the pelvis of the larger individuals.
§Lucy’s small size is seen as an expression of “sexual dimorphism.” This terminology refers to the difference in shape between individuals of different sex in the same species. For example, in mammals, the male is larger than the female.
§The first complete male afarensis skull was discovered in 1994, less than ten kilometers from the site of Lucy’s discovery. An analysis of the skull indicated that afarensis males were twice the weight of females.
Capital talked to Gezahgne Kebede president of the Ethio-American Trade and Investment Council and an honorary member of Council General of Houston, Texas behind Lucy’s visit.
On the departure of Lucy and her present status.
Gezahegne: Lucy, the oldest celebrity to ever visit Houston, arrived with a security befitting a head of state three months ago from Ethiopia and immediately went into hiding at the Houston Museum of Natural Science(HMNS).
Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia is an international exhibition organized by The Houston Museum of Natural Science in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Ethiopian Exhibition Coordinating Committee.

National funding is provided by The Smith Foundation and Ethiopian Airlines.
The publicized concerns about the safety of shipping the 3.18 million-year-old fossil remains has been done without any problem.

The world’s oldest hominid’s arrival was so tightly guarded and we don’t discuss the security arrangements for these things further. But I can assure you it was done very carefully. Lucy arrived on her first-ever exhibit tour of the U.S., with her escort Mamitu Yilma, Director of the National Museum here in Addis Ababa, where Lucy is normally kept. The discovery of Lucy continues to profoundly influence our understanding of human origins. “Lucy’s Legacy” provides people the opportunity to better understand current scientific theory of human evolution and to see for themselves how, more than 30 years after her discovery, she continues to create debate. Ethiopia’s rich cultural heritage is one of the best-kept secrets in the world. “Lucy’s Legacy” introduces you to the incredible five million-year history of this fascinating country, known as the Cradle of Mankind. More than 100 artifacts in the exhibit illuminate this rich heritage, including fossils, historical manuscripts, paintings, coins, musical instruments, implements of daily use, religious artifacts and more.
This exciting exhibit consists of two segments. Part one begins with the story of ancient Ethiopia and the Kingdom of Aksum. According to tradition, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, King Menelik became the founder of the Solomonic dynasty. The story starts with the kingdom of Aksum in the northern highlands of the country. During a period of roughly seven centuries, a succession of kings ruled a territory that covered large portions of present-day Ethiopia as well as neighboring Eritrea and portions of Yemen. This section follows the country’s rise in religious, economic and cultural power through the centuries, and ends with modern Ethiopia and the end of the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I.
The second part of the exhibit examines the many species of early hominid that called Ethiopia home, culminating with the display of the world’s most famous fossil, Lucy. Even the Ethiopian public has seen Lucy only twice. The Lucy exhibition at the Ethiopian Natural History Museum in the capital, Addis Ababa, is a replica, the real remains are usually locked in a vault. Emphasis on geographic and chronological context will set the stage to tell the story of our ancestors. A wide variety of multi-media presentations and text panels will also elaborate on what anthropologists do, and how we get from finding a fossil to telling a story such as the one we will present in this exhibit.

Visitors will not only have the opportunity to come face-to-face with Lucy, but also meet with the earliest known members of our own species, Homo sapiens, who lived almost 200,000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia. Other important paleoanthropological discoveries will also be represented to complete the current account of human evolution as known to scientists today.

On how has Lucy been received?
Gezahegne: At present and to be specific until Sunday February 10, 156,000 people exhibited Lucy’s Legacy, and it is among the museums top exhibits in regards to attendance. About 3,500 advance tickets had been sold before the opening of the exhibition and lines to buy tickets at the museum everyday is a normal scene. The show marks the first time Lucy, which is also the ambassador of Ethiopia, has been displayed in public outside her native Ethiopia.
At present the amazing figure has about 25 museums across the United States requested to exhibit Lucy in their Museum. Even Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, which claimed that Ethiopian artifacts would not come to the Smithsonian including Lucy because she is too fragile to move, inquired us to exhibit Lucy. (Many of the world’s top paleoanthropologists have been outraged by the decision to take Lucy out of Ethiopia, saying the fragile skeleton may be damaged irreparably during the journey)