The idea that evolution is a linear progression from "ape to angel" is flawed, argues Guy P. Harrison. Five decades after the discovery of Lucy, the fossil of one of the most ancient hominids ever discovered, why should we still be studying her? Lucy offers invaluable insights into our origins, highlighting Africa's central role and showing that bipedalism preceded brain expansion, reminding us that humanity is not the pinnacle of evolutionary progress.

Five decades after the 1974 discovery of Lucy, the most famous fossils of all time, it is fair to ask, So what? Why should anyone still care? Hasn’t she been scrutinized, popularized, and mythologized enough? What’s left beyond scientific minutiae and fodder for academic journals? There have been remarkable achievements in many fields of science since that November day when paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson spotted a three-million-year-old right ulna (lower-arm bone) that had been exposed by erosion in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Moreover, with climate change, biodiversity loss, nuclear-war risk, and the possible emergence of an artificial superintelligence, don’t we have more pressing concerns? What can the stone echoes of one long-dead Australopithecus afarensis possibly tell us that holds any relevance today? Plenty, it turns out.

The discovery had immediate scientific value in the 1970s because of the age (3.18 million years) and how relatively intact and numerous the fossils were (approximately 40 percent of a complete skeleton). Lucy showed us what ancestors just outside the outermost edge of our genus really looked like and how they most likely behaved and survived. She further solidified Africa as central to the human past and revealed that bipedalism came before larger brains. Lucy helped us understand that the evolution of life, including us, is not a ladder or linear path of progress from “ape to angel”. She also presents a subtle warning. Nature doesn’t care. There are no guarantees. Extinction can happen, even to the brightest species of the day.

The name Lucy was inspired by the Beatles’ hit song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” that played in the discoverers’ field camp during celebrations. She has other names: “Heelomali” (The Afar peoples’ name for her that means “She is special”); Dinkʼinesh (Ethiopian/Amharic for “you are marvelous”); and AL 288-1 (her official science ID). Going in the other direction, the fossils inspired NASA to name one of its spacecraft “Lucy”. It is on a 12-year exploratory mission near Jupiter and an asteroid it discovered in 2023 was named “Dinkinesh”.

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It is not necessarily doomsday paranoia to worry about Homo sapiens’ chances over the next thousand years, or even the next hundred.

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A few million and fifty years on, it is clear that neither the Pliocene nor modern museums can contain Lucy. She continues to be a source of pride for Ethiopians and other Africans, showing up on stamps, billboards, and in tourism marketing campaigns. Though distanced from us by the subjective borders of taxonomy and objective measure of years, the idea of Lucy remains close and relevant to modern humanity. She is a thundering emphasis to how ancient, complicated, and exciting the human-origin story is.

This year I attended a gathering of scientists who came from around the world to celebrate and discuss Lucy. I was struck by how this one discovery continues to generate interest, to keep answering old questions and inspiring new ones. “The Impact of Lucy on Human Origins Science”, hosted by the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, was a brilliant showcase of research and speculations about the fascinating Australopithecines. As much as the event transported me back in time, however, it also pushed me to think about the present and the particular high-achieving but neurotic and often-disappointing primate club I happen to have been born into.  

It is not necessarily doomsday paranoia to worry about Homo sapiens’ chances over the next thousand years, or even the next hundred. The power of our scientific technology keeps growing and requiring more responsibility from us, even as science illiteracy remains common and anti-science sentiments rampant. We have no political structure governing all or most people fairly and safely. Minimal standards of equal rights and justice for everyone elude us. Every moment of every day we aim thousands of nuclear warheads at ourselves. The current version of the natural world that we depend on to live took four-billion years to evolve, yet we are blindly dismantling it in a flash. We have no long-term plan for civilization. At the root of all this seems to be the need for greater awareness and understanding. We may be stuck teetering on the razor’s edge until the worst happens or a sufficiently large ratio of humanity learns and accepts where we come from, who we are, how we connect to nature and to one another, and what kind of future we want. Enter Lucy.

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Many people seem to imagine the human past as a few thousand years of civilization with hazy notions about “cavemen” tacked on as an afterthought. But Lucy and many other hominin fossils show that we hominins have been analyzing, creating, solving, adapting, and surviving for a long time. We did not become human the moment our brains grew to some arbitrary volume measure or when the first primate walked bipedally 51 percent of the time. Neither did it happen the day someone domesticated the first animal or built the first city wall. Looking back in the direction of Lucy, we can see that becoming human was intricate, messy, and never the obvious outcome. It was part of a massive, ultracomplex, indifferent and unintelligent flow of genes, flesh, bone, and behaviors stretching through countless lifeforms and across many millions of years. The idea of Lucy, standing upright three-million years ago with all of humanity ahead of her, urges us to see the big picture and finally act our age.

Some version of a paleoanthropologist in the far future may think about us in the same way we see the Australopithecines. We are remarkable survivors along the way, still becoming. Lucy helps us understand that we are not isolated in time and nature but are one small part of a vast and rich continuum of living matter (plus viruses, whatever they are). Overall, life on Earth is powerful, resilient, and likely to survive anything short of a gamma-ray burst. Species by individual species, however, life is precarious, fragile, fleeting.

During a panel discussion at the Institute of Human Origins symposium someone suggested that the study of human evolution is scientifically important but offers no practical aid to solving our biggest problems. I disagree. We, descendants of the Australopithecines, have managed to combine astonishing technology with staggering foolishness to threaten not only our existence but also that of many entangled species around us. Most if not all our biggest problems seem to stem from the cognitive chaos of a species who does not know itself because it doesn’t understand the context of its existence. Therefore, Homo sapiens urgently needs to popularize and internalize a more realistic/scientific perspective in hopes of toning down the crippling myopia and pathological irrationality.

Bad ideas and bogus beliefs will always pounce to fill the void when people reject or never learn basic facts and concepts from anthropology, astronomy, geology, history, biology, ecology, etc. For example, so long as we keep failing to educate most of the world’s children about evolution and the interdependency of life there will be no shortage of adults who don’t care about the destruction of the natural world. Racism will continue doing harm and slowing social progress as long as unscientific notions about our kinships and superficial differences remain popular. Anyone who lacks a sense of deep geologic time can never understand nor appreciate the story of their home and their species.

The key challenge we face this century is to use our brilliant and powerful primate brains to overcome our fallible and limited primate brains. We struggle to reign in subconscious biases and strategize beyond very short horizons. We spend enormous amounts of time, resources, and mental energy policing artificial borders of nations, religions, and races. Tearing down or at least poking holes in false walls and made-up obstacles to greater unity seems an obvious prerequisite for sustained survival and prosperity. Fortunately, human unity is not an esoteric or fringe concept. Thanks to anthropologists, we know that we are intensely social creatures and have been for a very long time. Expanding our natural compulsions for trust, charity, and cooperation to encompass everyone could be viewed as the logical expression of what multiple scientific disciplines tell us about the inner workings of Homo sapiens. The likely crucial step toward solving our worst problems is for all of us to accept that we are members of a closely related and vulnerable species with common hopes, fears, desires, and needs. This is the way we make peace with ourselves.

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She may not have been a full-fledged member of the vaunted human tribe, but she certainly can help nudge us closer to the clarity and maturity we desperately need here in the 21st century.

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During his closing remarks at the symposium, Johanson shared his disappointment and frustration with people who refuse to accept evolution as real. He doesn’t debate creationists, however, calling it a waste of time. “It’s too late,” he said. “Their minds are already closed. You need to teach students about the natural world from an evolutionary perspective in grammar school—not high school, not middle school.”

Johanson said he asked how many believe in evolution during a recent lecture in Denmark and “every single hand in that audience went up.” The United States is a very different story, however. Very few hands are raised in response to that same question in America, he said. “We have a big problem in this country. It is religion that has closed so many minds. I’m not saying we should attack religion, but we ought to keep people’s minds open to accept alternative views about how we got here.”

A Gallup study found that 40 percent of American adults hold a strict creationist view of human origins, meaning a god created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years or so. An additional 33 percent said they believe evolution has occurred but was guided by a god. Only twenty-two percent of U.S. adults said they accept evolution as a natural process without a necessary supernatural component (Brenan 2019).

What if the whole world listened to Lucy? What if everyone honestly contemplated the universal wisdom offered by these fossils? Thanks to the hard work of anthropologists and others, she continues to tell her story—and ours by extension, of course. If everyone were to accept Lucy as the fascinating family relative she is, perhaps it would be easier for us to see all people today as the 99.9-percent genetically identical kinfolk they are (National Human Genome Research Institute). Fewer adults might be so cavalier about nuclear weapons, climate change, and the destruction of ecosystems if every child learned that many human and hominin species thrived for long periods in the past but only one remains today.

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An evidence-based imagining of the struggles, triumphs, and failures of ancestors who lived thousands and millions of years ago can spark a crucial expansion of the modern mind. We are connected to the deep past. Recognizing and learning about it is necessary if we are to know ourselves today. Lucy was barely three-and-a-half feet tall, weighed less than 70 pounds, and had a brain much smaller than ours. She may not have been a full-fledged member of the vaunted human tribe, but she certainly can help nudge us closer to the clarity and maturity we desperately need here in the 21^st century.

The best current evidence indicates that anatomically modern humans have been around a relatively brief 300,000 years or so and civilization less than 10,000—not so much in the big picture. Though we may be confused, perhaps even half-crazed, there is no denying our abilities and potential. The human future might be positive, spectacular, and extraordinarily long. Or we might plummet into oblivion as boisterous big-brained losers who couldn’t or wouldn’t solve their own stupidity. Thanks in part to Lucy, some of us have been enriched by looking back at our past in the light of science. Let’s strive for a day when everyone not only does this but also thinks about the present and future with the benefit of that same honest and rational perspective.

Endnotes:

Brenan, Megan. 2019. 40% of Americans Believe in Creationism. Gallup (July 26). Available online at https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx.

Genetics vs. Genomics Fact Sheet. National Human Genome Research Institute (7 September 2018). Available online at https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Genetics-vs-Genomics.