Finding Lucy — and family history
Print Edition
The first time I read about Lucy, I was in the park with my little brother. They say that kids these days are too addicted to their phones, that they are unaware of the world around them and need to get out and play more. However, I beg to differ, because as I sat there, in the park, I discovered the most interesting thing. I found out about Lucy, and not from the paper that my dad often asks me to read, but from Google. Google likes to celebrate the anniversary of everyone and everything — including the Global Candy Cup — and on that specific day, they celebrated Lucy.
Lucy is dead; that’s an important thing to know about her. She has been dead for approximately 3.18 million years. In other words, she’s a fossil. Tom Gray and Donald Johnson found her in 1974. Now, in 2015, Google made a doodle to commemorate the 41st anniversary of Lucy’s discovery. I’m not quite sure why she intrigued me. Maybe it’s because she was named after a Beatles song and I love the Beatles or maybe it was the fact that she made up a complete example of Australopithecus Afarenisis. I made up stories about her for my brother to dream about and I questioned my friends about her.
I decided to do some research. She was named Lucy after the Beatles song “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” as that was the song playing on the radio when the two archeologists found her. She is a female hominid and is an Australopithicus, an extinct genus of hominid. A hominid is part of a primate family called hominidea — it is a category that consists of all species originating from the human/African ape ancestral split. She is special because hominids in particular have an interesting characteristic feature that separates them from the other species. Lucy can walk upright and so can all hominids.
Later that week, I asked my uncle about Lucy. To my surprise, he told me that his father’s cousin was supposed to be on the team of archaeologists that found her! I didn’t know his name and the Internet wasn’t of much help either, but I wanted to know why he did not join the group — something that could’ve made my family interesting. To solve this issue, I decided to ask my aunty. My aunty told me that he wasn’t able to go on the trip because he had fallen terribly ill. Besides, he had the chance to go on another research trip to Ethiopia that he thought of as more promising. Boy was he wrong ...
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