Tucked away somewhere in my dusty science writer’s memorabilia is a postcard I received in the early 1980s. On the front side is a picture of “Lucy”—hundreds of fossilized bones arrayed as the skeleton of a small primitive human ancestor. Lucy’s remains were unearthed in Ethiopia’s Afar region in the 1970s, and the postcard is signed by Donald Johanson, one of the anthropologists who discovered our famous forebear.
I don’t recall the content of the note, and the details don’t really matter. I was covering the human origins beat back then, and the scribbled note was no doubt related to something I had written about these fossilized remains. What’s interesting is the postcard itself, and the fact that some dusty old bones, whatever their scientific merit, were far more than mere bones. They were “Lucy,” a petite female who once wandered the Ethiopian plains. Within just a few years of her discovery, Lucy had achieved iconic status. She was a personality—indeed, a celebrity worthy of her own glam shot on a glossy picture postcard.
And not only a postcard, as it turns out. As Lydia Pyne describes in this engaging book, Lucy has also lent her name and cachet to all sorts of museum swag, not to mention coffee shops, a rock band, a fruit-juice bar, a typing school, and a political magazine. She is by far our most famous ancestor, and her 3.2-million-year-old bones are familiar not only to anthropologists and science journalists but to anyone with a passing interest in where we humans came from.
Pyne is less interested in the details of paleoanthropology—though she knows the field well—than she is in various fossils’ modern stories and their larger cultural significance. How and why did certain old bones (she writes about seven fossils here) achieve status as archetypes and icons and folk heroes, while others are mere fragments of skulls and femurs, stored away in museum vaults? Much of Seven Skeletons is an attempt to answer this basic question about cultural status: what it is, and how it is attained.
There are different forms of status in the realm of human origins, Pyne argues. In Lucy’s case, for example, fame comes at least in part from the bones’ discovery story—that is, the modern narrative about the scientists who dug her up and gave her a name and personality. The most prominent of these scientists is Johanson—dapper, smooth-talking, master publicist, and elegant writer of popular books. His accessibility clearly played a role in Lucy’s celebrated career. But Johanson was not digging alone at Locality 162 of the Hadar site on the November 1974 morning that Lucy emerged from the rubble. As Lucy’s story goes, Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray were working this location, tediously sifting through the earth without any luck. But just as the two were about to give up and walk away, Johanson spotted a bit of arm bone in the dirt, which he immediately recognized as a hominid fossil. Then he spotted a hand bone, a few inches away, and then more and more early human fragments.
Fairly quickly, the two fossil hunters began to realize that they were unearthing a significant find, an almost complete skeleton of an ancient ancestor. As Johanson recalls, they started jumping around, screaming and hugging, despite the 110-degree Ethiopian sun.
This discovery narrative comes mostly from Johanson’s first-person recounting, and it continues into the wee hours of the next morning. Back at camp, Johanson, Gray, and their colleagues were so excited that they could not think of sleep, so they talked on and on into the night. As they did, they blasted a tape of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album into the Ethiopian night, over and over, and at some point, Lucy got her nickname from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”
It’s a great story. It’s been told again and again, and has achieved mythic dimensions, along with the catchy nickname. Of course, Lucy—her technical name is AL 288-1 for the site location—is also famous for her scientific significance. Years of close analysis by many scientists around the world have assigned her to a previously unknown hominid species, Australopithecus afarensis, a small-brained biped. But that’s not why millions of museum visitors stand in long lines to catch a glimpse of the iconic skeleton, and to buy some Lucy memorabilia. We do that because Lucy is a rock star.
The Taung Child has a similarly engaging discovery narrative, told and retold in the annals of paleoanthropology. Raymond Dart, an anatomist working in Johannesburg in the 1920s, had made an arrangement with the manager of the fossil-rich Buxton Limeworks to ship him whatever fossils were unearthed during mining. One of these crates arrived on an October afternoon in 1924, the very day, as it happens, that Dart and his wife were hosting a wedding and reception. Dart himself was the best man but, as the story goes, he immediately started rummaging through the contents of the crate, dressed in full Edwardian wedding attire. He was hoping for evidence of nonhuman primates from the quarry, but after just a few minutes of digging around, he spied a small fossilized brain that he knew was from a human ancestor. Shocked and enthralled, he forgot momentarily about the waiting wedding party and had to be dragged by the groomsmen to the ceremony—and a perturbed groom.
This tale may be apocryphal, Pyne allows. There are other, much less romantic, variations; but this is the one that took hold. Whatever the circumstances, Dart had discovered evidence of a juvenile “ape-like” ancestor, a small-brained hominid who walked upright. He named it Australopithecus africanus—southern ape of Africa and, possibly, the long-sought “missing link” between ape and human. Most important scientifically, the fossil provided the first clear evidence that Africa was the true “cradle of mankind” as Darwin put it.
That was revolutionary thinking in the 1920s. Paleoanthropology’s interests lay elsewhere, mostly in Southeast Asia and Europe, anywhere but Africa. So it’s no surprise that Dart’s fossil find and interpretation were met with skepticism by the leading thinkers in the field. Colleagues dismissed the notion of a small-brained, bipedal ancestor: It simply did not “fit” with what “ought to be.” It didn’t help that Dart himself was something of a rogue scientist, flamboyant in style and unconventional in his analysis and writing.
As with Lucy, the scientist is as important to this tale as the bones themselves. Dart answered his critics by making casts of the Taung Child available to museums and universities and lecturing widely on the subject. Many different audiences around the world viewed the Taung Child, and the public—not just scientists—adored the child and its story. Both the fossil and Dart came to be seen as underdogs, folk heroes battling the odds and the establishment. And winning: More than twenty years after the controversial discovery in a crate of rubble, an adult of the same species was found, vindicating Raymond Dart and validating the credentials of the Taung Child. Early critics ate crow, and the early African fossil was finally accepted into the pantheon.
There is more to the Taung Child’s celebrity, however. As the fossilized skull achieved epic status, complete with an epic poem, our earliest ancestors came to be seen in the public consciousness as warlike, savage, aggressive. Poems and museum dioramas dramatized the idea of a hairy, club-wielding ancestor battling for existence in a hostile, primitive world. This depiction would eventually catch the imagination of artists and storytellers, including the director Stanley Kubrick, who, perhaps more than any other, immortalized the heroic warrior of our past in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.
All of Pyne’s stories deal, in one manner or another, with the fluid relationship between science and culture, in particular the science of human origins and modern notions of fame and celebrity. She emphasizes again and again that the most celebrated fossils—the ones she has chosen to write about here—are not necessarily the most important scientifically. Indeed, Pyne devotes an entire chapter to the so-called Piltdown Man, a fossilized human ancestor “discovered” in southern England in 1912 by a lawyer and amateur fossil hunter named Charles Dawson. Piltdown Man was taken quite seriously for four decades—and even given a scientific name, Eoanthropus dawsoni—until it was exposed as a fraud, bits of pieces of human skull, orangutan bones, and chimpanzee teeth masquerading as a prehistorical ancestor.
The perpetrator of the Piltdown hoax remains a mystery, and not because detectives haven’t tried to figure out whodunit. Arthur Conan Doyle was once a suspect, along with others, but the forgery remains a cold case. And a compelling romance and cultural addiction of sorts. In 2012, to mark the centenary of the fossil’s discovery, a team of scientists, calling themselves “Piltdowners,” met in London to crack the case. They arrived with all sorts of new analytic tools to examine the evidence once again—but alas, no perp was fingered. The scientific case may be closed, but the elusive and clever criminal celebrity lives on.
Wray Herbert is the author, most recently, of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits.
