Lucy's Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor

New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989. Assumed First Edtion . Hard Back. Very Good/Good. 6 1/4" x 9 1/4. Mazzella, Nicola - Design. 318 Pages Indexed. Front endpapers illustrated with a recreation of The Olduvai Lakeshore 1.8 million years ago by artist Jay Matternes. Illustrated throughout with black and white photographs and drawings. Fourteen page center section of color photographs primarily of anthropologists at work. Lucy's Child is the story of a discovery. In 1986 Donald Johanson. who forced a major reinterpretation of the early stages of human evolution by finding the famous Lucy skeleton. returns to search for fossils in Africa for the first time in a decade. His destination is Olduvai Gorge. a dusty ravine in Tanzania first put on the paleoanthropological map by Louis and Mary Leakey. Many of Johanson's colleagues warn Johanson that Olduvai's trove of fossils has long since been exhausted. But he is not in a position to turn the invitation down. Since the late 1970s the government of Ethiopia has virtually closed off the phenomenally rich fossil beds within its borders where Lucy was found. Meanwhile Johanson and his brilliant prickly colleague Tim White have become personae non gratae with Mary Leakey and her son who control access to all digging sites in nearby Kenya. Olduvai, exhausted or not. may be the last hope left for Johanson. Only three days after establishing camp something wildly almost absurdly fortuitous occurs. In the late afternoon. the survey team led by Johanson and White finds a piece of a two-million-year-old elbow lying on a gentle slope beside the main road through the Gorge. Next an upper jawbone turns up, giving irrefutable evidence that the specimen is a member of the human ancestral family. Lucy's Child is the firsthand account of a discovery that generates some surprising new insights into our beginnings. But the book is also the story of a science coming of age and a new kind of paleoanthropology that has been emerging. The science is charged by ego and rivalry but its practitioners have begun to apply rigorous self-questioning methods and prob- ing of hard evidence that yield real knowledge about our origins. The book asks the same questions that have puzzled scientists since Darwin: What made us human? When did we first walk upright? Why did we develop such astonishing mental powers? How different are we from the rest of creation? But it approaches these questions from a variety of new directions, incorporating techniques in studies of primates and new insights into the relationship of ancient man to his environment. What Johanson did not foresee was the discovery of a new hominid skeleton, doubly fortunate for his new book, Lucy's Child since the find was made while science writer James Shreeve was at Olduvai interviewing scientists and collecting impressions. Lucy's Child should appeal to anyone with an interest in the mysteries of the deep human past.