The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
LUCY’S BURDEN
Fifty years later, the ‘mother of humanity’ must continue to support her metaphorical offspring
SEVEN YEARS AFTER The Beatles released “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, and 40 years before she featured as part of a mind-expanding drug-fuelled sequence in Lucy (2014), a four-foot female — who would have been too “small brained” for Charles Darwin to consider as an ancestor of the Homo Sapien — changed the story of human history. Even what it means to be human. In 1974, the discovery of the skeletal remains of a female hominin in Ethiopia, changed the way early human evolution was conceived. Named Lucy, she became the embodiment of the “mother of humanity”.
Biologically speaking, human beings — and now extinct related species, like Neanderthals — are defined by three features: Large brains, tool use and walking upright. Darwin thought that all three developed at the same time. Lucy, at just four feet tall as an adult, could walk — but her brain was not commensurately large. Her bones led to a revolution in human paleontology, with many other hominins — some even largely arboreal — becoming part of the complicated origins of the species that built skyscrapers and artificial intelligence.
Soonafterlucy'sdiscovery,scientistsbegantospeakofmitochondrialeve—thefirstcommon female ancestor of all living humans. But Eve is a shifting being, a hypothetical one based on mothers and daughters today. Lucy was real — and likely a person. Somehow, that makes her more relatable. Of course, like many mothers today, both the concept of Mitochondrial Eve and bones of Lucy have had to bear too much — creationists objecting to their very existence, scientific siblings taking out their conceptual hang-ups on the longdead maters. Then there's the fact that she is resurrected by sci-fi and pop culture at regular intervals. But perhaps the “mother of humanity” carries the same burdens as her prosaic, small-scale counterparts — bickering, ungrateful children who won't let her rest.