Emily
Houston
I love Lucy. (Sorry, had to go there.) — 2 months ago
Visiting the Lucy exhibit was something I very much wanted to accomplish before I left Houston. Lucy is the nickname of the most complete skeleton (about 40%) of an Australopithecus afarensis found to date. The skeleton is from about 3.2 million years ago and was discovered in 1974. They’re important because they answered a question that scientists had been debating for some time: did we start walking on two legs and then develop larger brains, or did we develop larger brains and then start walking on two legs? Turns out brain development came second.
I read an interesting article in Time that was somewhat critical of Lucy’s travels abroad. She’s barely been on display in Ethiopia over the last thirty years, and the Houston exhibit is the first time she’s left her home country. There’s a proposed five-year American tour for Lucy, but several museums have refused to show her on the grounds that she’ll be damaged in transit. (Despite the fact that she’s not quite as delicate as, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were here in Houston less than four years ago.)
Houston might seem like a strange choice for her first stop, but it turns out we have a lot of connections to Ethiopia. Mickey Leland, the Texas congressman actually died in a plane crash on a mission to Ethiopia in 1989, and apparently he’s well known in the area because of this. Despite all our advantages, it still took six years to reach an arrangement with the Ethiopian government. She’s heading to Seattle next, and then who knows, but once she goes back to Ethiopia, it’s highly unlikely that they will give her up again.
Seeing Lucy up close was quite breathtaking. She was much smaller than I expected. The Time article mentioned that there isn’t the same emotional resonance viewing a replica as there is viewing the original bones, and I agree. They have a standing replica immediately behind her. It isn’t quite the same.
The rest of the exhibit didn’t interest me all that much. There were several rooms of things on loan from Ethiopian museums, but they seemed anachronistic. Most of the artifacts were from 1800 to 1900 and some were more recent than that. There were some videos that tried to give some context about Ethiopian history, but Lucy’s really the star of the show. Well worth the $15 ticket price, especially considering a lot of that money goes back to Ethiopian museums.
It’s quite a privilege to see Lucy, so if you get the opportunity, I suggest you take advantage of it.
