Michael Rauner
Lucy
2003
Archival Pigment Ink Jet (text on verso)
$150

www.michaelrphotography.com

from back of image:

Lucy

In 1871 Charles Darwin published his widely discredited speculation that fossils of the earliest humans and their primate ancestors would be found somewhere in Africa. During these days, just over a hundred years ago, the Church still officially insisted that humans were divinely created in 4004 BC.

  On November 30, 1974, American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate research student Tom Gray decided to walk through a gorge on the way back to camp in Hadar, about 100 miles south east of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They were surveying for fossils in locality 162, an area of a dry lakebed sliced with gorges and rich with fossils, but they were having no luck that day. After a few moments in the gorge, Johanson discovered a fossilized hominid right proximal ulna - an arm bone sticking out of the dirt. They quickly collected an occipital bone, some ribs, a couple of vertebrae, part of a female pelvis, and more.  

Later that night, there was much excitement over the discovery of this relatively complete and extremely primitive skeleton. Though many primitive hominid fossils had been discovered before, the oldest skeleton prior to this discovery was that of a 75,000 year old Neanderthal in Europe. These bones were 3.18 million years old and represent the earliest known hominid biped. Bipedal locomotion is considered the trait that most clearly distinguishes human from ape, and was an evolutionary necessity, it is speculated, for the positioning of the larynx to allow for the capacity for speech, and consequently, the development of abstract thought.  

The anthropologists never went to sleep that first night after the skeleton in Hadar. They stayed up jubilant, drinking, singing, and dancing at their base camp with the Afar tribesmen beside the river Awash. The camp had a tape recorder and someone had a tape of The Beatles and in their exuberance, they played 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' over and over again. At some point in the evening - no one remembers when or by whom - the skeleton was given the name 'Lucy.'