Lucy, the famed 3.2-million-year-old fossil that transformed scientific understanding of humanity’s origins, has been placed on display at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi.
The fossil preserves about 40 per cent of the skeleton of an early human ancestor. She was found at the Hadar site in Ethiopia’s Afar region in 1974 by a team led by American palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson, and has remained a scientific and cultural fixture ever since. The Guardian has referred to her as the “mother of humanity”.
Lucy is displayed alongside a reconstruction of what she may have looked like in The Human Story, one of the museum’s galleries. She is on loan to the museum courtesy of the Ethiopian Heritage Authority.
The fossil has offered several insights into early humanity over decades of study. Features of her pelvis, femur and spine provided early evidence that Australopithecus afarensis walked upright, helping clarify when bipedalism first emerged in human evolution.
Her name came from the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which Prof Johanson has said was playing at the expedition camp on the night of the discovery. Scientific descriptions of the fossil were published soon after, followed by extensive analysis of her anatomy, age and the environmental conditions of the site.
Lucy has been exhibited in several locations over the past 50 years. In Ethiopia, the fossil has been shown at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, and she has also travelled internationally.
Between 2007 and 2013, Lucy was part of a touring exhibition in the US, with confirmed stops at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Pacific Science Centre in Seattle and the Bowers Museum in California. The tour was organised with the Ethiopian government and included opportunities for scientific examination. In recent years, she has remained mostly in Ethiopia for conservation and research purposes.
Lucy’s presence in public culture extends well beyond scientific research. Since the 1970s, she has appeared in documentaries, museum publications and popular-science books, including Prof Johanson’s Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind and Lucy’s Legacy, which introduced the fossil to a wider audience.
The 2014 film Lucy, directed by Luc Besson and starring Scarlett Johansson, also referenced the discovery – its title was inspired by the fossil, the opening sequence portrays an early hominin identified as “Lucy”, and Morgan Freeman’s character cites A. afarensis in a discussion of evolution.
Over time, the fossil has become a familiar reference point in classrooms, textbooks and exhibitions, making her one of the most widely recognised early human ancestors.
Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi opened earlier this month on Saadiyat Island.
