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By Mary Carmichael
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It's been 3.2 million years since she died--and 32 since she was unearthed from the Ethiopian desert and christened after a Beatles song--but the prehuman fossil known as Lucy can still draw a crowd. Six hundred people showed up last Thursday at Georgia College & State University to meet her discoverer, Don Johanson, who was promoting his book "From Lucy to Language." From now on, though, Lucy will have to share the spotlight. On the same day, halfway around the world in Addis Ababa, a Johanson protégé named Zeresenay Alemseged was showing off another, newly revealed Australopithecus afarensis fossil--a toddler the media nicknamed "Lucy's baby." And in Georgia and elsewhere, the little girl captured the public imagination as her relative had three decades earlier. After his speech, Johanson says, "somebody asked me how it felt to be a grandfather."
Technically, he shouldn't be passing out cigars. The new specimen--whose real name is Selam, or "peace," in Amharic--was born about 5,000 generations (more than 100,000 years) before Lucy unwittingly donated her body to science. She's es-sentially from the same place, the fossil-rich Afar region of northeast Ethiopia. In 2000, one of Alemseged's colleagues spotted a cheekbone about 2.5 miles south of Lucy's resting place. The team moved what tiny pieces it could back to the lab, and over the next few years, as erosion weathered away the sand around the fossil, Alemseged gently did the same using dentists' tools.
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As Selam's skeleton emerged from the sandstone, so did its significance. It is one of the most complete human ancestral fos-sils ever found, with a skull, torso and parts of the arms and legs. Some bones--including the shoulder blade and hyoid, a horseshoe-shaped bone involved in speech--have never been seen in its species. The child is thought to have been about 3 at death, which makes her doubly important. "Juveniles are basically bite-sized morsels for hyenas," says Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at Berkeley, "so we don't find very many of them."
So far, Selam has mostly confirmed what scientists already suspected: her species walked upright, with a mosaic of proto-human and proto-ape traits. But she has also kicked off a few arguments. Her discoverers point to her shoulder blade and curved fingers as evidence that she often climbed trees. White, on the other hand, says, "There's been substantial arm-waving about that." He thinks the traits are evolutionary leftovers from Lucy's tree-dwelling ancestors, not yet replaced by natural selection. Selam's brain is another point of contention. It seems to have grown slowly, indicating a long childhood, a luxury known in few species other than humans. ?But in humans, slow growth yields a big brain--all the information learned in childhood has to be stored somewhere. Afarensis had a small brain, leaving "a big question mark" as to why, says anthropologist Bernard Wood.
As Alemseged continues to chip away at the fossil (much of it is still encased in stone), some of those questions may be answered and new ones may arise. The team will also undoubtedly find more fossils at the site--after all, says Alemseged, "we have 500 square kilometers to explore." In the meantime, Lucy's bones will soon be touring the States for the first time. Clearly, someone isn't willing to give up her star status just yet.
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