"Very engaging, thanks perhaps to popular scientific journalist
Wong, [LUCY''S LEGACY] communicates the poignancy of Johanson''s
occasionally nerve-wracking return to the birthplace of his career
with something of the verve and suspense of an Indiana Jones movie.
Hooked by that adventurous beginning, and introduced to many of the
figures whose work preoccupies what follows, many will continue
with the book''s real meat, which implicatively but not literally
argues that far from there being n
內容簡介：
“Lucy is a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton who has become the
spokeswoman for human evolution. She is perhaps the best known and
most studied fossil hominid of the twentieth century, the benchmark
by which other discoveries of human ancestors are
judged.”–From Lucy’s Legacy
In his New York Times bestseller, Lucy: The Beginnings of
Humankind, renowned paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson told
the incredible story of his discovery of a partial female skeleton
that revolutionized the study of human origins. Lucy literally
changed our understanding of our world and who we come from. Since
that dramatic find in 1974, there has been heated debate and–most
important–more groundbreaking discoveries that have further
transformed our understanding of when and how humans evolved.
In Lucy’s Legacy, Johanson takes readers on a fascinating
tour of the last three decades of study–the most exciting period of
paleoanthropologic investigation thus far. In that time, Johanson
and his colleagues have uncovered a total of 363 specimens of
Australopithecus afarensis Lucy’s species, a transitional creature
between apes and humans, spanning 400,000 years. As a result, we
now have a unique fossil record of one branch of our family
tree–that family being humanity–a tree that is believed to date
back a staggering 7 million years.
Focusing on dramatic new fossil finds and breakthrough advances in
DNA research, Johanson provides the latest answers that post-Lucy
paleoanthropologists are finding to questions such as: How did Homo
sapiens evolve? When and where did our species originate? What
separates hominids from the apes? What was the nature of Neandertal
and modern human encounters? What mysteries about human evolution
remain to be solved?
Donald Johanson is a passionate guide on an extraordinary journey
from the ancient landscape of Hadar, Ethiopia–where Lucy was
unearthed and where many other exciting fossil discoveries have
since been made–to a seaside cave in South Africa that once
sheltered early members of our own species, and many other
significant sites. Thirty-five years after Lucy, Johanson continues
to enthusiastically probe the origins of our species and what it
means to be human.
From the Hardcover edition.
關於作者：
Pioneering paleoanthropologist and winner of the American Book
Award, DONALD C. JOHANSON founded the Institute of Human Origins in
1981, now located at Arizona State University in Tempe.
KATE WONG has been covering human evolution for Scientific
American for more than a decade.
From the Hardcover edition.
內容試閱：
Chapter 1
The Woman Who Shook Up
Man''s Family Tree
Never in my wildest fantasies did I imagine that I would discover a
fossil as earthshaking as Lucy. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of
traveling to Africa and finding a "missing link." Lucy is that and
more: a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton who has become the
spokeswoman for human evolution. She is perhaps the best known and
most studied fossil hominid of the twentieth century, the benchmark
by which other discoveries of human ancestors are judged.
Whenever I tell the story, I am instantly transported back to the
thrilling moment when I first saw her thirty-four years ago on the
sandy slopes of Hadar in Ethiopia''s Afar region. I can feel the
searing, noonday sun beating down on my shoulders, the beads of
sweat on my forehead, the dryness of my mouth--and then the shock
of seeing a small fragment of bone lying inconspicuously on the
ground. Most dedicated fossil hunters spend the majority of their
lives in the field without finding anything remarkable, and there I
was, a thirty-one-year-old newly minted Ph.D., staring at my
childhood dream at my feet.
Sunday, November 24, 1974, began, as it usually does for me in the
field, at dawn. I had slept well in my tent, with the glittering
stars visible through the small screen that kept out the
mosquitoes, and as sunrise announced a brilliant new day, I got up
and went to the dining tent for a cup of thick, black Ethiopian
coffee. Listening to the morning sounds of camp life, I planned
with some disinclination the day''s activities: catching up on
correspondence, fossil cataloging, and a million other tasks that
had been set aside to accommodate a visit from anthropologists
Richard and Mary Leakey. I looked up as Tom Gray, my grad student,
appeared.
"I''m plotting the fossil localities on the Hadar map," he said.
"Can you show me Afar Locality 162, where the pig skull was found
last year?"
"I have a ton of paperwork and am not sure I want to leave camp
today."
"Can you do the paperwork later?"
"Even if I start it now I''ll be doing it later," I grumbled. But
something inside--a gut sense that I had learned to heed--said I
should put the paperwork aside and head to the outcrops with
Tom.
A couple of geologists joined us in one of our old, dilapidated
Land Rovers, and in a cloud of dust we headed out to the field. I
sat in the passenger seat enjoying the passing landscape peppered
with animal fossils. Flocks of quacking guinea fowl ran for cover,
and a giant warthog, annoyed by our intrusion, hurried off, its
tail straight up in the air. Unlike many mammals that had been
hunted to extinction in the area, the Hadar warthogs were left
alone by the Afar locals, whose Islamic faith forbade eating pork.
Tom put the Land Rover through its paces, and as we picked up speed
in the sandy washes, my mind switched gears into fossil-finding
mode. After we dropped off the geologists, who needed to inspect an
important geological fault that had disturbed the sedimentary
layers near Locality 162, Tom and I threaded our way along smaller
and smaller gullies.
"Somewhere around here," I said. "Pull over." Then I laughed as it
occurred to me that in the remote desert you don''t have to pull
over, you just stop driving. We got out and spent a few minutes
locating the cairn that had been left to mark the pig skull''s
locality, a little plateau of clay and silt sediments bordered by
harder layers of sandstone. A year earlier, a geologist had been
out on a mapping mission and the plateau was obvious on the aerial
photographs we had toted along; otherwise we might have overlooked
it. After carefully piercing a pinhole into the aerial photo to
mark the spot and labeling it "162" on the reverse side, we
lingered. I was reluctant to return to camp and my paperwork. Even
though the area was known to be fossil poor, we decided to look
around while we were there. But after two hours of hunting all we
had to show were some unremarkable fossil antelope and horse teeth,
a bit of a pig skull, and a fragment of monkey jaw.
"I''ve had it. When do we head back?" Tom said.
"Right now." With my gaze still glued to the ground, I cut across
the midportion of the plateau toward the Land Rover. Then a glint
caught my eye, and when I turned my head I saw a two-inch-long,
light brownish gray fossil fragment shaped like a wrench, which my
knowledge of osteology told me instantly was part of an elbow. I
knelt and picked it up for closer inspection. As I examined it, an
image clicked into my brain and a subconscious template announced
hominid. The term hominid is used throughout this book to refer to
the group of creatures in the human lineage since it diverged from
that of chimpanzees. Some other scholars employ the word hominin in
its place. The only other thing it could have been was monkey, but
it lacked the telltale flare on the back that characterizes monkey
elbows. Without a doubt, this was the elbow end of a hominid ulna,
the larger of the two bones in the forearm. Raising my eyes, I
scanned the immediate surroundings and spotted other bone fragments
of similar color--a piece of thighbone, rib fragments, segments of
the backbone, and, most important, a shard of skull vault.
"Tom, look!" I showed him the ulna, then pointed at the fragments.
Like me, he dropped to a crouch. With his jaw hanging open, he
picked up a chunk of mandible that he wordlessly held out for me to
see. "Hominid!" I gushed. "All hominid!" Our excitement mounted as
we examined every splinter of bone. "I don''t believe this! Do you
believe this?" we shouted over and over. Drenched in sweat, we
hugged each other and whooped like madmen.
"I''m going to bring the ulna to camp," I said. "We''ll come back for
the others." I wanted to mark the exact location of each bone
fragment scattered on the landscape, but there were too many pieces
and time was short.
"Good idea. Don''t lose it," Tom joked, as I carefully wrapped the
ulna in my bandanna. I decided to take a fragment of lower jaw,
too, for good measure. I marked the exact spots where the bones had
lain, scribbled a few words in my field notebook, and then got back
into the Land Rover.
The two geologists relaxing in the shade of a small acacia tree
looked relieved when we drove up to rescue them from the
stultifying heat. As they stood and greeted us, they could tell
from our giddy grins that we''d found something.
"Feast your eyes!" I said, and opened the bandanna. I held the ulna
next to my elbow. Being geologists, they didn''t know a lot about
bones, but they understood the importance of the find. Back into
the bandanna the bones went, and then into my khaki hat for the
trip to camp in the safety of my lap. Thirty minutes later Tom
announced our arrival by honking the horn, and as we pulled to a
stop our inquisitive teammates surrounded the car.
I jumped out of the Land Rover and everyone followed me to the work
area, where a large tent fly protected our plywood work_tables.
Still in a state of semidisbelief, I sat and unpacked the precious
remains. Reassured that they were in fact real, I sighed with
relief. Everyone leaned over to see the tiny fragments of arm and
jaw. The questions came fast and furious. Is there more? Where''d
you find it? How did you find it? And then there was a stunned
silence as the import of what we''d found sunk in. It hit me that if
I had walked just a few more paces and looked to my left rather
than my right, the bones would still be there on the slope. And in
the ever-changing landscape of the Afar, a single desert
thunderstorm could have washed them off the plateau, over a cliff
and into oblivion, forever.
Suddenly someone slapped me on the back and exhilaration replaced
awe. We all started talking at once, and we had to keep raising our
voices to be heard so that eventually no one could hear what anyone
else was saying. A hurried lunch followed and then everyone wanted
to see the spot where I had found the ulna. At the locality my
colleagues stood back as I carefully pointed to the bone fragments
on the slope. Immediately my team understood that what they were
looking at was a partial hominid skeleton. It was a special moment
for all of us, though I don''t think any of us truly realized how
special at the time.
We celebrated the discovery with a delicious dinner of roasted goat
and panfried potatoes washed down with a case of Bati beer my
students had somehow managed to smuggle into camp. Conversation
became less animated and more technical, focusing on morphology and
size. I felt from the beginning that the fossils belonged to a
single individual because there was no duplication of parts in the
remains we collected; the pieces all had the same proportions and
exhibited the same fossilization color. I further argued that the
skeleton was a female specimen of Australopithecus--a primitive
human forebear--because of the small size of the bones relative to
those of other australopithecines. All australopithecines were
sexually dimorphic, which is to say males and females exhibited
physical differences beyond those pertaining to the sex organs. So
if the lightly built ulna we discovered were from a male, then a
female would have to be unbelievably tiny.
While we were all talking, Sgt. Pepper''s Lonely Hearts Club Band
was playing on a small Sony tape deck. When "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds" came on, my girlfriend Pamela Alderman, who had come to
spend some time in the field with me, said, "Why don''t you call her
Lucy?" I smiled politely at the suggestion, but I didn''t like it
because I thought it was frivolous to refer to such an important
find simply as Lucy. Nicknaming hominid fossils was not unheard of,
however. Mary and Louis Leakey, giants in the field of
paleoanthropology, dubbed a flattened hominid skull found in
Tanzania''s Olduvai Gorge "Twiggy," and a specimen their son
Jonathan found ...
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