I was skeptical about whether or not I cared about the Lucy exhibit that is currently on display at the
Pacific Science Center in Seattle. But after getting there and going through the whole thing, it has altered my view and context of humans and where we are. In a nutshell, "
Lucy" is the name given to set of 40% complete fossil bones found in Ethiopia of a hominid (any member of the biological family
Hominidae to include living or extinct great apes, and humans and pre-humans). She is thought to be 3.2 million years old.
When you first enter, you go through a series of exhibits about the history of Ethiopia. This alone for me was fascinating, because for whatever reason, just my own ignorance I suppose, I thought nothing of Ethiopia. I knew it was a place where people starved, and that was about it. Ethiopia is one of the world's oldest nations, and was the home of the Aksumite Empire, one of the four great powers in the 4th century BCE, along with China, Persia, and Rome. The Aksumite Empire was the first to convert to Christianity, and has long been a place where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish people have lived together. The exhibit hilights the accomplishments of this country from the time of King David through contemporary history. The events leading up to current conditions in Ethiopia are fascinating and maddening, including Mussolini spraying Ethiopian men, women and children with chemical weapons in 1935, to avenge Italy getting its ass kicked by Ethiopia in the First Italo-Ethiopian War. For as much as people complain about the problems in Africa, it's interesting to note how nearly all of the causes are easily traced back to Europe, the US, Russia, or Asia. Invasions, slavery, diamonds, oil - whatever it is, you can see the clear line of cause. (Endless Enemies by Jonathan Kwitny, a WSJ reporter, clearly illustrates these ties). So anyway, even just the historical aspects of Ethiopia were mind-numbing.
But then you come to learn that Ethiopia is also the main location where successive evolutionary hominids have emerged and then set out across the planet. It is, essentially, the birthplace of human beings. Most likely, we ALL have a common grandmother from this region who lived about 200,000 years ago. While it's mildly interesting to find out that you're 1/32 Native American, or that your great aunt slept with a person of a different race, or that some guy 6 generations back was a prince or a duke or whatever, to me it's 10,000 times more incredible that all the humans currently living on Earth are brothers and sisters coming from the same common point of ancestry. We butcher each other over differences in religions, territory, water, mates, money, resources, and whatever else, and this point is lost. It seems that instead we should learn more about Ethiopia, even travel there, and respect it for what it is in context of human evolution and civilization. Ethiopia is and has been (for 5M years) a monumental place for humans, yet in the contemporary world it is considered almost completely insignificant.
One of the best things about the exhibit is how it starts with the oldest known fossil hominid skulls, and works up through time to the modern
homo sapian skull. The skulls, for the most part, start off small and get progressively larger while the face becomes steadily more flat. After the last skull, you enter the room where Lucy's bones are laid flat in a glass case, surrounded by a large, curved wall mural, a portion of which is shown below:
That's about 1/6 of the total mural, but this is the part that shows Lucy standing on the rock to the left of the river, holding her baby. There is also a model of Lucy (photo at top) where she has been reconstructed using her very complete fossil skeleton.
The progression of skulls and the mural depict roughly 5 million years of evolution, starting with small chimp-like creatures and going up to today with modern humans. Modern humans are not the end of the process - our evolution continues to this day and we will look different, if we survive, thousands of years into the future. That was one of the major things that hit me at this exhibit, not just that we'll keep changing, but just
how short a span of time 5 million years is. Think of it like this: The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Life arose quickly, between 4.5B and 3.8B years ago. In that time, there have been 5 major extinctions in which at least 50% of life has gone extinct. The last major extinction was 65 million years ago, the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Today, the sixth mass extinction is occurring and increasing rapidly, with the loss of about 3,000 species per year and growing. But the thing that struck me was that humans have gone through
all of their evolution to today in only 5 million years at the tail end of that 65M since the last mass extinction. Many of those evolving hominids lived for thousands of years, and each of them had their own lives, history, customs, trials, tribulations, all that life going on and on, and it's just a tiny slice, just a minute sliver of what has happened on Earth to date, and even just a tiny fraction of what has evolved since the last of five major mass extinctions.
The ease with which life becomes extinct and changes on this planet is the same as us eating a cheeseburger or taking a walk. It happens often, and will happen again. And as important as we seem now, it's apparent that Life and Earth could care less. Their indifference is either our opportunity for success, or our recipe for failure - the choice, it seems, is ours to make or break.
If Lucy comes to a museum near you, GO SEE IT. There is some controversy about moving the actual bones around, and I agree with most of the scientists I've read on this, that they could have easily substituted replica bones for Lucy's actual bones, but since this thing is on display and taking a six-year tour of the US, you might as well go if it comes near you.
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