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.
Professor Stephen Oppenheimer's Journey Of Mankind based on DNA studies places humans at Meadowcroft 25,000 years ago. They may have come across the Atlantic ice sheet and may be the source of the DNA haplogroup X present in northeast Indians.
I'm beginning to favor the 'Kelp Highway' idea for the west and South American incursions. There is a kelp forest offshore that stretches from to Japan to Chile and would have been an excellent source of food...(I used to dive for abalone in Northern California in the mid-60's.) Anyway, this would allow for an early entry and possibly explain the presence of old (Jomon/Ainu-like) skeletons that are unlike the modern Native Americans.
(Penon Woman)
"The most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance….Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide skulls…"
Pardon, if I see seem shrill but you have a link for some evidence that Europeans were in America even 11,00 years ago? I don’t know how to break this to you, but Native Americans are basically Asians. They are not Caucasoids or Negroids, so what else is left?
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We have this paper at work and I was ridiculing this article today. The wild leap of faith it takes to believe in this nonsense makes creationists look positively scholarly and scientific in comparison.
The estimated age of Lucy is 3.2 million years, whereas Leanne is 9,500 years old.
There is no link between these two distinct separate species of completely different times and places, except the desperation of evolutionists to make fantastic connections and get published and patted on the back by each other and grant granters.
Even if true, it’s probably a bad idea to tell some of those old boys that they’re, as Dennis Hopper memorably put it, “part eggplant”.
How can Lucy be 3.2 million years old when the earth is only 6000 years old?
Pamela LeBlanc might just be a little out of element!
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/13/1097607299082.html?from=moreStories
Physical therapy that takes the ‘ow’ out of ‘bow wow’
October 14, 2004
When dogs do their cruciates, rehab programs work just as well as for people, writes Pamela LeBlanc...
I saw the headline and thought...I don’t believe it, there’s an ETHIOPIA in TEXAS?
Leanna looks like she was hot.
Lucy was like another monkey and may not have been in direct line with us anyways.
LOL. I thought the same. Now, there is an Alice, Texas to rival your Alice Springs.
DOWN UNDER?
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