Lucy in the Sand with Footnotes 
by Matt Cartmill 
Lucy: The Beginnings of Human- 
kind, by Donald C. Johanson and 
Maitland A. Edey. Simon and Schus- 
ter, $16.95\ 409 pp., ill us. 
She lived unknown, and few could 
know 
When Lucy ceased to be; 
But she is in her grave, and oh, 
The difference to me! 
William Wordsworth 
When Don Johanson christened his 
3.5-million-year-old Ethiopian woman- 
ape, what he had in mind was John 
Lennon’s Lucy in the Sky with Dia- 
monds, not Wordsworth’s sweetheart. 
But the Wordsworth version fits bet- 
ter: dead woman, dates uncertain, 
nameless grave. And oh, the difference 
to Johanson — and to anthropology in 
general. Since that November after- 
noon in 1974 when he and Tom Gray 
hugged each other and danced a jig 
among Lucy’s half-buried remains in 
a gully near the Awash River, Johan- 
son has been transformed from a brash 
young Ph.D. with a nervous grin and 
a promising Pliocene site into a paleo- 
anthropological superstar with a 
trunkful of the most dazzling fossil- 
hominid jewels ever to come out of 
the East African hominid mines. 
The late Louis Leakey spent half 
a lifetime prowling and sweating up 
and down Tanzanian arroyos to amass 
a similar collection of fossils. It took 
Johanson and his team just two field 
seasons to come up with Lucy — a hom- 
inid skeleton that is more than 3 mil- 
lion years older than the next-oldest 
reasonably complete skeleton of a hu- 
man ancestor. The following year, Jo- 
hanson’s group found the remains of 
thirteen or more individuals in a 
clump, all apparently killed at once 
by a flash flood — a sort of quick-fro- 
zen primeval horde that gives us the 
only evidence we have about the vari- 
ability and composition of early homi- 
nid bands. The year after that, the 
group found the earliest-known stone 
tools. Any one of these finds would 
be enough to catapult the finder into 
international prominence and turn 
competitors green with envy. Johan- 
son’s competitors and colleagues, my- 
self included, have been Day-Glo char- 
treuse for the past five years. 
In the late 1960s, when Johanson 
was a graduate student, there were 
three broad schools of thought about 
human evolution. Each school had a 
different idea about the number of 
hominid species that had coexisted in 
the African Pleistocene, and so they 
were sometimes called the one-, two-, 
and three-species schools. Their real 
disagreements, however, were about 
what it means to be human. The two- 
species interpretation, which Johanson 
absorbed from his teachers at the Uni- 
versity of Chicago, had its roots in 
the thinking of Raymond Dart and 
his view of man as Killer Ape. Ac- 
cording to this school, early hominids 
were of two sorts, corresponding 
roughly to Lennie and George in John 
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. There 
was Paranthropus, a big, dumb vege- 
tarian type, and Australopithecus, a 
small, wiry meat eater who subsisted 
by bashing the local fauna with 
slightly sharpened rocks. As time went 
on, according to the two-species sce- 
nario, the nasty little killer got smarter 
and handier with rocks, exterminated 
the big herbivore, and went on to 
evolve into Man the Hunter. 
The one-species believers were egal- 
itarians with vaguely leftish anteced- 
ents (notably Leslie White and G. F. 
Gause), who traced hominid origins 
to tool using and believed that it was 
impossible for more than one such 
tool-using, culture-bearing species to 
exist at a single time. In their view, 
Paranthropus was neither retarded 
nor herbivorous, but just an interme- 
diate population on the lineage leading 
from Australopithecus to Homo — and 
all three probably ought to be called 
Homo. Some fans of Marx who clung 
to the fringes of this school weren’t 
above hinting that the two-species peo- 
ple were closet apologists for apart- 
heid. Finally, the three-species school 
saw the brain as the hallmark of hu- 
mankind and held that most known 
fossils, with their jutting brows and 
receding foreheads, could not possibly 
be ancestral to university professors. 
The three-species school got its nick- 
name from the ideas of its leading 
exponent in the 1960s, Louis Leakey, 
who devoted his career to searching 
for advanced Homo in the early Pleis- 
tocene of Africa. At Olduvai Gorge, 
he believed he had found, in addition 
to a Paranthropus and a beetle- 
browed Homo erectus , a gracile homi- 
nid with a small brow ridge and a 
respectably large brain. Leakey and 
his coworkers christened this third spe- 
cies Homo habilis, and Leakey ac- 
claimed it as the true ancestor of 
Homo sapiens. Almost every anthro- 
pologist pooh-poohed this notion. The 
two-species people insisted that early 
habilis was just Australopithecus and 
later habilis was just H. erectus. The 
single-species enthusiasts, perplexed 
at first by finding supposed ancestors 
and descendants living side by side, 
finally decided that the little Paran- 
90 
