ABSTRACT
Since 1986, I have been a regular visitor to Ethiopia. In Addis Ababa, I always drop in at the National Museum to say hello to Lucy. Lucy is old – 3.2 million years of age. She got her name when members of the Ethiopian–Western team who found her skeleton in a dried-up lake in the north-east of the country listened that night to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by the Beatles. It sounds romantic, but as is often the case with these kinds of discoveries, the Western researchers took most of the credit for the find and the local contribution remained somewhat obscured. But without their Ethiopian colleagues and local Afar guides, they would never have reached that desert and would never have found her. The Ethiopians lovingly gave her another name: Dinkenesh, meaning ‘beauty’. Perhaps we have difficulty pronouncing this pet name, but with a little practice it catches on quickly. Dinkenesh has always stayed close to where she was found – near her own ground. What was found of her skeleton lies open and exposed on a soft surface under bulletproof glass.
