Opinion Lucy at 50: The burdens of the mother of humanity

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.

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Soon after Lucy’s discovery, scientists began to speak of Mitochondrial Eve — the first common 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 long-dead 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.