SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Fifty years ago today, a groundbreaking discovery was unearthed in Ethiopia, the fossilized bones of a human ancestor, and you probably already know her name...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS")
THE BEATLES: (Singing) Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
DETROW: ...Lucy, named for The Beatles' song that was playing during the expedition. Lucy was the oldest and most complete skeleton of the human ancestor Australopithecus, when she was discovered half a century ago. The researchers who discovered Lucy were American, and at the time, many of the people working in the field of paleoanthropology were American or European. But that slowly began to change as a new generation of scientists from Ethiopia were inspired by discoveries made in their country. One of them was Zeray Alemseged. He's a professor at the University of Chicago and joins me now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: Thanks for having me, Scott.
DETROW: Do you remember the first time you heard about the Lucy discovery?
ALEMSEGED: Yes. When Lucy was discovered in 1974, I was 4 or 5, so I couldn't possibly know what was happening. But much later, when I joined high school, maybe college, is when I became aware of the discovery and significance.
DETROW: When did you first get interested in the field? When did you first start thinking, this is what I want to do?
ALEMSEGED: I got interested in paleoanthropology after I graduated in geology from Addis Ababa University and was assigned to work at the National Museum of Ethiopia where Lucy was housed in. The office I was assigned to work in was filled with fossils that came from many sites, including the Lucy site. And to see the original fossils of Lucy and to really encounter famous paleoanthropologists, like my good friend Donald Johanson, who came to do field work and also museum work - as (ph) a combination of getting inspired by those who worked in Ethiopia, but also the fact that I had the opportunity to physically see Lucy was what triggered the interest and then the passion that I have now.
DETROW: For people listening who don't know, can you tell us more about your big discovery in 1999?
ALEMSEGED: So my discovery was a skeleton of a child. In short, you can describe her as the earliest child ever discovered in the history of paleoanthropology. It's a skeleton that is more complete than Lucy and lived 150,000 years before Lucy, a child that died at the age of 2 1/2. And because of her antiquity and her completeness, and because it belongs to a child, it provides us with the type of information that you cannot extract from adult individuals.
DETROW: Yeah.
ALEMSEGED: So, in short, what I have discovered is the earliest child and the most complete child in the history of paleoanthropology.
DETROW: Over the past half century, there have been so many other big discoveries, yours included, that have kind of filled in the gaps before when Lucy lived and after. Why does Lucy still matter 50 years later?
ALEMSEGED: Well, Lucy matters because she continues to be the benchmark. Lucy's significance at the time of discovery was to really extend the antiquity of humanity by a whopping 1 million years. But that didn't stop because when I made my discovery, for example, I had to compare it to Lucy. When many discoveries are made in Kenya or South Africa, in other parts of the world, people would have to go to the National Museum of Ethiopia to compare their discoveries with Lucy, meaning that Lucy continues to be the reference against which you would judge the completeness or the age or the shape of the bones, so you can understand how different or how similar they are.
DETROW: Yeah.
ALEMSEGED: So the significance of Lucy continues.
DETROW: That is Professor Zeray Alemseged. Thank you so much.
ALEMSEGED: Thanks for having me, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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