In the world of palaeontology, Lucy is like Brangelina, Nelson Mandela and the Queen rolled into one. She is by far the most famous fossil in the world. She has the diminutive stature of a chimpanzee and a pelvis that suggests she walked upright; that combination makes her a platinum milestone along the path of human evolution.
And that is why the 3.2 million-year-old is leaving her home country of Ethiopia and embarking on a celebrity tour of America. The first stop on her six-year odyssey is the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where she went on display on Friday.
But some of the country’s most respected museums have refused to participate in what promises to be one of the most lucrative science exhibitions ever staged. The Smithsonian in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York have both demurred; its curators do not believe that the damage inevitably wrought by the journey is justified. Richard Leakey, who works in Kenya and is an elder statesman among fossil experts, is more blunt. “It’s a form of prostitution. It’s gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity, and it should not be permitted,” he rails. Instead, he suggests, tourists should go to see Lucy in Ethiopia.
Of course they won’t, which is why the impoverished country signed a deal to send her abroad. (Besides, Lucy, who was discovered in 1974, has only been displayed twice in Ethiopia, and is otherwise cached in a vault.) The profits from ticket sales will be used to upgrade Ethiopian museums. One message on the PhysOrgForum noticeboard notes the educational benefit: “I am all for fossils touring the US, a country where 61 per cent of people are knuckle-dragging creationists.”
But Leakey’s outburst is not to be taken lightly. Unesco, which deals with scientific and cultural matters at the United Nations, has a 1998 resolution – to which Ethiopia, America and the UK were signatories – stating that hominid fossils (ie, those of our ancestors) should only be moved from their country of origin for compelling scientific reasons, and that replicas should be circulated for display. By packing up Lucy, the oldest and most valuable specimen of human ancestry, everyone concerned has shown a preference for profit over propriety.
Anjana Ahuja