Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain Page 3

  With the discovery of the Java specimen, or Homo erectus, in Indonesia in 1891 by Eugène Dubois, scientists had to stretch the age of humankind back to half a million years or more. The Java specimen (Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie, Leiden, Netherlands) was described as an “ape-man.” Disturbing as the idea of evolving from such a primitive creature was to some people, Java Man walked upright and undeniably represented an important phase in human evolutionary development.

  Neither ape nor human, Australopithecus afarenis is considered to be an ancestor of modern human beings because of its bipedal locomotion. On average, females weighed sixty to sixty-five pounds and were three and a half to four feet tall; males, ninety to 120 pounds and four and half to five feet tall.

  The finding of other bones, skulls, and teeth—the fossil remnants from which earlier beings are identified—added more, and sometimes older, hominids to the “family tree.” The Mauer mandible (Geologisch-Palaeontologisches Institut, University of Heidelberg), discovered near Heidelberg, Germany, in 1907, had a massive jaw with humanlike teeth and is estimated to be as old as seven hundred thousand years. Peking Man (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China; Paleontological Institute, Uppsala, Sweden), found at Zhoukoudian, China, in 1927, handled fire and made stone tools and was thought to have lived from a quarter million to a half million years ago. Taung Infant (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa), found in an area called Taung in Cape Province, South Africa, and identified in 1924 by Raymond Dart, an Australian anatomist living in South Africa, was proclaimed a “missing link.” More than three decades later, after much doubt was cast by the British anthropological establishment, which said the creature was an ape—skulls of young apes are difficult to distinguish from those of hominids—evidence revealed that it was a two-million-year-old hominid. The 1959 discovery of a very robust australopithecine skull at Olduvai (National Museum, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), by Mary Leakey in Tanganyika, Africa (now Tanzania), revealed another creature who lived 1.75 million years ago; the then-new method of potassium-argon dating made the previously laborious and often inaccurate process of determining the age of fossils virtually conclusive.

  The skeleton of "Lucy." Shortly after finding the bones, Donald Johanson heard the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and adopted the girl's name in the title for his ancient creature.

  The dilemma, and the source of contention for paleoanthropologists, was whether hominid fossils were Homo or Australopithecus (a pre-human genus named by Dart), and further, in what species of the chosen genus a fossil should be placed, or whether a new one needed to be created. Homo species were established, and earlier hominids fit in neatly. Australopithecines were at first categorized as either robustus, stout and vegetarian, or africanus, gracile (slender) and omnivorous. But confusion still existed, complicated when the bogus Piltdown Man was thought to be genuine. It would take new hominid discoveries and years of debating and investigating, utilizing modern technologies, to clear up the confusion and establish a generally agreed-upon evolutionary scheme and explanation.

  In 1974 a young American paleoanthropologist of Swedish descent named Donald Johanson was looking for hominid fossils in Hadar, a site in the Afar region of Ethiopia. This was one of many sites in the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa where paleoanthropologists concentrated their searches for hominid fossils from the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs (five million years ago until ten thousand years ago). This was Johanson’s second field season in as many years.

  On the last day of November, Johanson’s assistant, Tom Gray, a graduate student, went over his itinerary for the day. He was uncertain of the location of a particular site for a fossil map being composed and needed some guidance. Johanson was overloaded with work at the camp, but he had a gut feeling that something important had emerged from the ground and was waiting to be discovered, before erosion destroyed it forever. He agreed to help.

  They made their way to the fossil site and searched it thoroughly, but nothing remarkable turned up. It was blazing hot; Gray was tired and wanted to return to camp. Johanson obliged, but he chose a circuitous route that would bring them to a desiccated ravine he wanted to canvass. This proved more rewarding than he could ever have imagined. Johanson spotted a bone that he instantly recognized as hominid. Forgetting the heat and their fatigue, the two combed the immediate area, turning up dozens of bones.

  The men were incredulous. Paleoanthropologists consider themselves fortunate if they find a single tooth or fragment of bone, lucky indeed if they turn up a fragment of a hominid skull. Johanson and Gray were looking at enough ancient bones to assemble into a skeleton! This was unprecedented.

  When the field season ended, Johanson headed back to his home base, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Now he had the considerable challenge of determining exactly what he had found. From the shape of the pelvic bone, he knew the skeleton was that of a female. It was apparent that Lucy—the nickname he gave the creature—was very, very old. But was she Homo (more closely related to living humans) or Australopithecus (from an extinct branch of the human family tree)? Or ape? The answer would shed light on the course of human evolution.

  Johanson delighted in his quarry; he knew he had something special. Lucy’s brain was too small and her jaw wasn’t rounded enough for Homo. And although she was apelike, her knee joint indicated she walked upright and her teeth were humanlike. She was hominid, not an anthropoid ape. An australopithecine, but which species? Africanus? Robustus? Perhaps something else?

  Over the next four years (with two more field seasons at Hadar, one of which yielded the important “First Family,” the skeletal remains of more than a dozen australopithecine children and adults found at one site), Johanson dedicated himself to determining Lucy’s significance. As a specimen, Lucy was unique because her multiple bones permitted the approximation of not only her height and weight but also her body proportions, or the relative sizes of her arms, legs, and other parts of her body. Bone reconstruction also revealed much about the creature’s functional anatomy, particularly locomotion, or the way the bones and muscles moved. But perhaps the most fascinating finding was what Lucy revealed not as an individual specimen but as part of a species.

  Johanson engaged specialists in radiometric dating to make an exhaustive examination, and their results were breathtaking. Lucy was more than three million years old and an older australopithecine than the robust and gracile creatures. Indeed, she was ancestral to both Homo and Australopithecus, which is to say, she was an ancestor of all later hominids, including modern humans, and all australopithecines.

  Lucy was an entirely different species. What to name her? Because she had been reposing in Ethiopia’s Afar region, Johanson, Tim White, an assistant anthropology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yves Coppens, the director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie at the Musée de 1’Homme in Paris, settled on the name Australopithecus afarensis.

  Johanson’s assertion that Lucy was a new species was naturally challenged by some of his colleagues, but it was eventually accepted by most of the paleoanthropological community. Then other questions popped up. Who came before Lucy? How far back did hominids go? Past Lucy, the evidence is sketchy. In 1994 a new hominid fossil species was discovered in Ethiopia in rocks about 4.4 million years old. Named Ardipithicus ramidus, the species is even more apelike than Lucy but is barely humanlike because of the anatomy of its teeth. It fills the gap between apes and hominids and is about as primitive a hominid as could be expected as well as the oldest hominid species known today. Another newly discovered species, Australopithecus anamensis, was announced by anthropologist Meave Leakey and her colleagues in 1995. More than four million years old, anamensis walked bipedally and might be ancestral to Lucy.

  Exploring around Lake Victoria in eastern Africa in the 1940s, Louis Leakey (the husband of Mary Leakey) reached far back in time. Remarkably, he discovered fragments of
apes from the Miocene epoch, twenty million years in the past. Evidently various types of primitive apes flourished during this epoch, but except for the line that eventually produced human beings, most became extinct (the ancestors of living chimps and gorillas also left descendants). Today there are fossils of primates known to be as old as sixty-five million years.

  The enduring Miocene line filtered into various primates of uncertain identity, but sixteen or seventeen million years later Australopithecus afarensis emerged. And it was australopithecines like Lucy who nurtured the seeds that gave rise to Homo habilis, who spawned Homo erectus, from whom in turn sprang Homo sapiens.

  Johanson believes that Lucy lived near a lake and weighed about sixty pounds. Sometime when she was in her twenties, more than three million years in Earth’s past, the diminutive hominid was down by the edge of the lake, where for some unknown reason she died, only to become entombed in the ground, her repose undisturbed through the ages, until she was serendipitously found in our own modern era.

  LOCATION: National Museum, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

  THE CODE OF HAMMURABI

  DATE: Eighteenth century B.C.

  WHAT IT IS: A stele, or stone pillar, on which are inscribed the legal provisions of the Babylonian king Hammurabi. The code is one of the great documents of ancient jurisprudence and one of the most complete collections of laws to survive. Other ancient codes that have survived include the laws of King Ur-Nammu, the reforms of Urukagina, the Hittite laws, and the biblical codes.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The code is inscribed on a black basalt stele over 8 feet high depicting King Hammurabi standing before Shamash, the Sun God, who is seated on a throne atop a mountain, receiving the sacred laws. Below him is engraved the code, comprising forty-nine columns of cuneiform text.

  By 3500 B.C., on a verdant and fertile plain cradled by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia (an area now known as Iraq), an advanced civilization had developed. Here, to a degree hitherto unknown in ancient societies, a sophisticated form of written communication accessible to and used widely by the people enabled the spread of information and the development of a complex commerce and culture.

  During the course of the third millennium B.C., the Sumerians dominated the region, ruling over several city-states. But by about 2350 B.C., their power began to erode, and a new breed of warriors managed to unite Mesopotamia under the rule of the Akkadian kings.

  Two centuries after the start of the dynasty, the empire began to crumble. The city-states reverted to their old rivalries, and once again blood began to spill. So it was a most formidable task for Ur-Nammu, king of the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2000 B.C., and later, Hammurabi, an Amorite whose reign began in the eighteenth century B.C., to reunite the warring towns and villages. With fierce determination, Hammurabi was able not only to reestablish the city-state alliances secured by his forebears but, leading his army to the north against the city of Mari, was able to expand his empire to the whole of Mesopotamia.

  During his forty-two years as king, Hammurabi continually had to fight rising coalitions vying for power and city-states seeking autonomy. But his military prowess and his strong political leadership enabled him to maintain an extraordinary degree of social harmony.

  Hammurabi’s system of rules for conduct and punishment in his kingdom was set down in his law code, his greatest accomplishment. The code addressed nearly every aspect of life in Babylonian society, including property ownership, trading, loans, partnerships, contracts, marriage, adultery, divorce, adoption, children’s rights, inheritance, religion, military service, perjury, burglary, looting, robbery, rape, assault, and murder. The cuneiform canons were designed to prescribe justice for abused parties. Depending on the crime, a variety of punishments could be inflicted, ranging from fines, forfeiture of property, flogging and public ridicule, to severing the hands, to death by burning or drowning. The code’s provisions represented nothing less than Hammurabi’s blueprint for the proper running and administering of a society.

  The Code of Hammurabi

  After Hammurabi died around 1750 B.C., his son Samsuiluna inherited the kingdom but was barely able to keep order. One century later, Babylonia was no longer capable of repelling invaders. The Hittites were the first to maraud the area, followed by the Kassites, who settled there. It is not known where the stele of the Code of Hammurabi was sequestered during this time.

  Babylon’s demise came around 1160 B.C. when the truculent Elamites, led by King Shutruk-Nahhunte, initiated a series of military operations. The Elamites marched into the cities of Babylonia and slew hundreds, if not thousands, of people at a time. The most frequently used form of execution was impalement, although other macabre means such as burning or clubbing were undoubtedly employed. After pillaging and looting, the Elamites eventually returned to their capital in Susa with the Babylonian statue of Marduk (the god of Babylonia) and other famous Mesopotamian sculptures including the victory stele of King Naram-Sin of Akkad and the Code of Hammurabi. In time, Babylonian resistance prevented the Elamites from ever fully conquering the region, and the statue of Marduk was finally returned as a symbol of good faith. The Elamites would not give up the Code of Hammurabi, however.

  In accord with their practice of defacing inscriptions of captured monuments and etching on their own dedications, the Elamites obliterated some of the script on the code, but for some reason—perhaps because of the stele’s warning that defacers would be cursed—a new inscription was never written. The monumental stone pillar, which required great labors in its making and presumably in its transport, was placed in a temple in Susa, where it was certain to have been treasured. After the Elamite civilization declined several hundred years later, the last traces of reference to the code were lost.

  In early 1902 French archaeologists excavating in Iran around the site of the old Elam capital of Susa discovered a cache of artifacts, one of the greatest of which was the stele bearing the Code of Hammurabi. The code not only offered a revealing portrait of the righteous king but also provided invaluable insight into the law and culture of Babylonia, one of the oldest civilizations of recorded history.

  LOCATION: The Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

  THE CONTENTS OF KING

  TUTANKHAMEN’S TOMB

  DATE: Circa 1352 B.C.

  WHAT IT IS: The contents of the burial chambers of the ancient Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The cache of royal burial treasures found in the antechamber, annex, sepulchral chamber, treasury, and corridors includes the king’s gold mask, golden throne, couches, royal robes, golden shrine, wishing cup, perfume vases, necklaces, decorative pectoral, gold pendants, alabaster vases, caskets, chests, stools, chairs, hassocks, weapons, chariots, statues, figurines, faience cups, corselets, sandals, ornate sticks, whips, bows, gloves, fruit baskets, model boats, paintings, boomerangs, and games.

  Were it not for the pertinacity and dogged detective work of archaeologist Howard Carter, one of ancient Egypt’s greatest treasures might still be buried. Carter’s fellow archaeologists had for years scoffed at his conviction that one or more of the sepulchres of the dynastic pharaohs located in the Valley of the Kings might remain chaste and undiscovered. But Carter was convinced that none of the previously discovered tombs was that of King Tut, and that he must still slumber somewhere beneath the mounds and rubble of the plundered valley.

  It had been the practice of ancient Egyptian pharaohs to be buried in royal tombs with the bulk of their resplendent earthly belongings to ensure safe passage to, and well-being in, the afterworld. Elaborate measures were taken to fortify their death chambers and protect them from grave robbers bold enough to risk the vengeance of the spirits. Burial galleries were mined in secrecy, false passages constructed, rubble piled floor-to-ceiling against the ponderous doors to the burial chambers, interior rooms bolted shut, and statues of feared animal-gods placed to guard the doors. Over time, however, the royal treasures fell prey to determined plunderers. T
omb robbers would raid at night, tunneling by the light of a flickering candle while sentries stood guard at the entrance.

  Eventually, virtually all the kings’ tombs were foraged. But the tomb of Tutankhamen, a king who at the age of nine or ten began a reign that was to last nine years, somehow managed to elude the most skillful poachers. Tut’s tomb even remained undetected by the hermits and bandits who in later centuries sought shelter and refuge in the royal necropolis, and later by scientists employing modern devices and techniques.

  The existence of Tutankhamen had been unequivocally established, but his tomb and mummy had never been conclusively documented, as had been done for the other pharaohs. In the early 1800s such famed archaeologists as the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni and the German Karl Richard Lepsius surveyed the valley, cleared whatever tombs still lay untouched, and pronounced the area exhausted. In the early 1900s, however, Theodore Davis, an American, received permission to explore the valley and spent many seasons digging. Some tombs were found, including those of Yuya and Thuya, ancestors of Tutankhamen’s wife. Davis declared the boy-king mystery solved when he found a small vault containing relics inscribed with the names of Tutankhamen and his queen. Satisfied that he had found Tut’s tomb, Davis terminated his concession from the Egyptian government to excavate the valley.