A sculptor's rendering, part of an exhibit focusing on the 3.2-million-year-old hominid called Lucy, shows how she might have looked in life.
(Photo: Dave Einsel / Getty Images file)
Puzzling Over Pre-Humans -- Cosmic Log/MSNBC
The world’s best-known skeleton of a human ancestor - whose name, "Lucy," came from a Beatles song - now lies splayed out in Seattle's Pacific Science Center like ornaments in a glass jewelry case. Or, more aptly, like 3.2-million-year-old pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Anthropologists are still working on the puzzles about human origins that have been posed by Lucy and other fossils, including a major find that was made just a couple of miles away from the place where Lucy was found 34 years ago.
The long-running mystery surrounding the "First Family" - a grouping of fossil bones representing up to 17 of Lucy's kin from Ethiopia's Afar region - is just one of the many unresolved plot threads in the scientific story about our long-ago ancestors.
"Lucy's Legacy," an exhibition that began its Seattle run last weekend, recaps the story so far. The traveling exhibit made news last year when it came to the Houston Museum of Natural History, because it represented the first time the Ethiopian government allowed Lucy's skeleton to be displayed abroad. Since then, the cultural controversy has settled down - but scientific controversies continue.
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