Posted on 12/22/2007 10:24:43 AM PST by blam
Archeologist explains link between bones found in Ethiopia, Texas
Lucy's bones on display at Houston museum
By Pamela LeBlanc
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, December 22, 2007
One roamed the forests of East Africa 3.2 million years ago. The other lived in Central Texas more than 9,500 years ago.
What's the connection between two skeletons found a world apart? That was the question on a recent visit to Houston, where the famous older skeleton is on display.
Though not complete, Lucy does have enough pieces, especially skull bones, for scientists to predict her measurements.
This model at the Houston Museum of Natural Science shows what our ancestors might have looked like, based on the bones of Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old prehuman.
Scientists take a guess at what Leanne, a 9,500-year-old human, might have looked like based on skull pieces found near Leander.
Michael Collins, a UT research associate at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, studies a model of Lucy's skull.
After Lucy, the oldest, most complete pre-human skeleton ever excavated, arrived at the Houston Museum of Natural Science this fall, we enlisted the help of Michael Collins. He is a research associate at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas who led a dig at the Williamson County site where the more modern remains were found.
For decades, Lucy has been tucked away under tight security at the National Museum in Ethiopia, for scientists' eyes only. Her exhibit at the Houston museum marks the first time her bones have been publicly displayed outside of Ethiopia.
Collins had studied a cast of her bones but had never seen them in person. Until now.
The story of Lucy's discovery ignites the inner archaeologist. On Nov. 30, 1974, Donald Johanson was returning to his Land Rover after working at a dig site in Ethiopia. The glint of an elbow bone in the sun caught his eye, and he looked up to see a cache of bones peeking out of the sandstone. If Johanson hadn't spotted them when he did, the next storm might have washed them away.
The skeletal remains were dubbed Lucy, after the Beatles' tune "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which was played at a celebration the night of her discovery. Her brain was just one-third the size of a modern brain, yet she walked upright. She represented a new species of human ancestor.
"Lucy's relevance to Central Texas is she took some of the first steps in human adaptive radiation that led to the peopling of the Americas," Collins says.
Which brings us to Leanne, the nickname some people gave to the human skeletal remains discovered near Leander in 1983 by crews walking the path of the proposed extension of RM 1431 east of U.S. 183. Leanne was found buried with a fossilized shark tooth, perhaps used as a piece of jewelry or an amulet, placed next to her collarbone. A large stone, shaped like a grinding stone but with one edge chipped away, was placed over her knees. Her bones were in poor shape — and soft as graham crackers.
Archaeologists realized the area, called the Wilson-Leonard site, had been occupied on and off for at least 11,000 years. Scientists traveled there from all over the world. The human remains, which scientists say are particularly significant because they were intentionally buried, are now housed at UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin.
If Leanne were alive today, she'd look just like anyone else on the street. Not so with Lucy. At the Houston exhibit, more than 100 artifacts portray the cultural history of Ethiopia. Visitors can watch a video interview with the archeologist who found her bones and inspect a model of what Lucy may have looked like in life. Covered with soft brown fur, with splayed toes and a muscular neck, she looks more chimplike than human. In a dimly lit room at the end of the exhibit, people gather in a sort of hushed reverence around a glass case that holds Lucy.
Her bones are arranged on a black background. Her grayed teeth are still attached to her jawbone. Her ribs are broken, but nearly all there. Her backbone looks like a modern backbone. Her skull is in pieces, but sections critical for scientific measurement are here.
This exhibit took more than five years of planning. Security forces from Ethiopia personally delivered the remains to the Houston museum, each piece individually packaged. About 1,000 people a day view the exhibit, and a projected 250,000 will see Lucy before the exhibit closes April 27. It's a coup for the popular museum, which sold a record 3 million tickets in 2006 and is planning an $85 million expansion that will include a new wing, classrooms and a Hall of Paleontology.
"Only a few paleontologists and anthropologists have studied these bones," says Brad Levy, director of customer service at the museum. "To get right next to it is amazing."
But the exhibit has stirred controversy. Some people have harshly criticized the museum for bringing in Lucy, saying transporting and exhibiting the valuable bones is too risky and could damage them. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., turned down the opportunity. After the exhibit leaves Houston, it will embark on a 10-city tour of the United States.
But Collins sees merit in the exhibits. "I think the opportunity for this crowd of people to stand here and say 'I have seen the oldest known hominid ancestor of my people' is worth the risk," he says. "Some will have ethical quarrels, but in my view, the cultural enrichment trumps the others."
He hopes those who see Lucy will understand her significance as a distant relative of the remains found in Texas — and of us.
So what's the tie between the two sets of bones? Why is Leanne also important?
For the past 70 years, most experts believed that a prehistoric culture known as Clovis, named for the New Mexico town near where remains were discovered, was the first human culture in America. The Clovis people, they said, came from Asia across the Bering Strait land bridge 11,500 years ago, walked down the ice-free corridor of Western Canada and slowly spread out across the Americas.
A minority of archaeologists has questioned this theory. Among them is Collins, who has spent the last 25 years investigating alternative interpretations. He says an archaeological site in Monte Verde, Chile, where he worked for 20 years, and other sites precede Clovis and prove that people arrived in the Americas before the ice-free corridor opened.
The sticking point? Whether people had the technological ability to get here before the land corridor existed. The Clovis-first advocates didn't think so. Collins and others do.
He says he considers it "denigration of people 11,000 to 15,000 years ago to say they were incapable of traveling on open waters by boat. To say they were incapable of having boats is silly."
He bases his own argument on the idea of "adaptive radiation." Over generations, a species slowly expands into neighboring habitat, adapts and then pushes into the next habitat. With humans, the process is cultural as well as biological. They develop clothing, for example, that protects them in harsher climates, or build boats that allow them to spread down coastlines.
Ancestors of modern humans such as Lucy adapted first to the forests of East Africa. Their descendants gradually moved into other habitable areas of Africa, then Europe and Asia. Eventually, they populated all the non-glaciated and non-desert parts of Eurasia and Africa. Over the last 100,000 years, they began to explore and fish the oceans.
Some 20,000 years ago, Collins believes, they began arriving in the Americas by boat, probably via two routes — the North Atlantic and North Pacific shores. Humans, he says, would have been drawn like a magnet to those coastlines, which are rich with plankton, shellfish, birds and mammals.
From there, they would have spread through the continent, eventually reaching Central Texas and beyond. He thinks that's how the ancestors of Leanne, among the oldest human skeletons uncovered in the Western Hemisphere, got here.
A glimpse of Lucy's bones in that glass case in Houston, then, is a glimpse at distant relatives of Central Texas' most famous human fossil.
pleblanc@statesman.com; 445-3994
Original Story Data
If you go ...
Houston Museum of Natural Science, One Hermann Circle Drive, Houston. Tickets to the Lucy exhibit are $20 for adults, $12 for children, seniors and students. For more information, go to www.hmns.org or call (713) 639-4629.
GGG Ping.
//its a joke, lighten up..
A minority of archaeologists has questioned this theory.
The DNA picture is getting pretty clear; there were folks along the west coast, reaching all the way to South America, who came via watercraft. They came pretty early, probably 15,000 years ago or earlier, and probably didn't extend very far inland. This left the rest of the continent unoccupied for the folks who came by foot a little later.
I thought at first, we had a new serial killer in Texas.
Unless she's a perfect 36-24-36, I ain't interested.
Something about a beach. *sigh*
It’s the thing I miss most, living in PA now.
My Wife tells her Yankee co-workers Texas is, has been and forever will be the *Birthplace of Creation*
Just thinking..
Even with the land bridge we are looking at thousands of miles. Just getting to the 'land bridge' across Northern Siberia, then Western Alaska short summers, cold ,long winters.
The need to find food, shelter, etc.
Is that really conceivable?
Yup. The latest DNA results suggest occupation of Beringia some 30,000 years ago, followed by a long period in that area prior to busting loose into the rest of North America, perhaps 15,000 years ago.
That is a long time to adapt to the cold, so traveling through Canada would have been no problem when the ice-free corridor opened up.
Guilty!
Yes, it is not like they made the trip in a year but rather over a period of hundreds of years.
How do they surmise that “Lucy” was covered by soft brown fur?
bmflr
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According to Intrade, the winner of the December 12th GOP debate was... Duncan Hunter.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1938773/posts
Barbecue.
A professor I had in College (eons ago) postulated that humans could have walked over several times duing periods of ice advance and retreat when migration corridors would have been open, and could have been in North America as early as 32,000 years ago, no boats needed.
“Native Americans” have become increasingly shrill and hysterical as the anthropological picture of Asians and Europeans arriving in the Americas first becomes ever harder to hide. Their immediate seizure and reburial of skeletons 11,000 to 22,000 years old is just one last gasp at trying to hide the truth. Today’s “Native Americans” are being revealed to have been just the last to migrate to prehistoric America, not the first.
Of course, but why was the artist instructed to do so?
Because that’s what the paleoanthropologists believed most likely.
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