Lucy and Selam unveiled: Exclusive preview and interviews at new ‘People and Their Ancestors’ exhibition
On Monday 25th, in the presence of the Czech Prime Minister and Ethiopian Minister of Tourism, the globally famous remains of the hominins Lucy and Selam were unveiled at Prague’s National Museum. The finders of the fossils were honoured guests at the ceremony, and Danny Bate from the RPI team was present too.
For sixty days, the Czech National Museum is inviting all Europe to its new ‘People and Their Ancestors’ exhibition, where it sets out the story of our evolution, from the first hominins to the Homo sapiens of today. The exhibition has at its heart the unique opportunity to see the fossils of ‘Lucy’ and ‘Selam’, both over three million years old and never before displayed together, nor in Europe.
To mark the occasion, the National Museum pulled out all the stops and on August 25th, it organised a grand opening. Invited guests attended an opulent reception, with speeches, live music and lunch, while journalists and media organisations got a sneak peak at the exhibition beforehand.
It was during this preview that Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Ethiopian Minister of Tourism Selamawit Kassa, and renowned anthropologists Donald Johanson and Zeresenay Alemseged removed the cover over the star exhibits. Johanson and Alemseged were reunited with their respective world-famous discoveries: Lucy (called Dinkʼinesh in Amharic, found in 1973) and the infant Selam (found in 2000). The two belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis, a very early member of humans’ evolutionary family, thought to have lived 3.9–2.9 million years ago.
Meeting the discoverers
The event’s honoured guests gave personal interviews, including Donald Johanson, who admitted to being impressed and charmed by the Czech capital. He admitted that it was his first time in Prague, but “not my last”, and he gladly recounted the finding of Lucy in the Ethiopian region of Hadar back in 1973:
“This discovery for me, as a young scientist, was when I was 31 years old. Today I'm 82, so it's a big difference in my age. But I remember very distinctly that I was out working in an area that we didn't visit very often. We had found a large skull of a fossil pig, and we had to put it on our map.
“So we went back to the site, and we looked and looked. And we didn't find many fossils. We found a few pieces of a baboon. We found some antelope bones. When I was walking back to my car, my Land Rover, I just looked over this shoulder, and I saw this little bone, from the elbow. I could tell it was not from an antelope or any large animal, because it was very small. So I thought it might be from a baboon.
“When I picked it up and looked at it, I could see that the anatomy, the shape of the bone, was of a human kind. Then I looked over there, and there were pieces of skull. I looked up the slope, and there were pieces of arm and leg, and a piece of jaw. I realised, in that moment, it was part of a skeleton. What was so important was that it was older than three million years.
“At that time, in the history of discovery in anthropology, everything older than three million that was on the human tree, you could put in your hand. So this opened up a completely new window for us. I didn't know who it was. I didn't know if it was a new kind of human, a new species. I didn't know if it was a male or a female. I didn't know much about it. But I knew it would be important. It was, of course, the discovery that defined my career as an anthropologist. It was my childhood dream, there at my feet. So it was an incredible moment.”
Donald Johanson was also happy to answer the question of the now-famous name: why was the discovery called ‘Lucy’?
“Our camp, all of my team, had thirty people in the desert. When you make a discovery like this, everybody is so excited. Everybody wants to see what this is, what it looks like, to take them to the place. So that night, my team and students had a small party. We actually had some beer. Not as good as your beer in the Czech Republic, and not as cold, but we were celebrating and listening to music.
“The music that was playing, and I was a big fan of it, as I am today, was The Beatles. Everybody in the world has heard of The Beatles, of course. I had a little tape recorder, and one of the tapes playing was Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was playing. So one of the expedition members said, ‘Do you think this is a female?’ I said yes. She asked why. I said, ‘Because it's so small. The length of the thigh bone is only something like that. She had to be very short. And it had to be a female. It couldn't be a male’. And she said, ‘Well, why don't you call it Lucy?’ I thought, ‘I'm a scientist. It has to be some complicated name’. But it was too late. So at breakfast, it was all, ‘Are we going back to the Lucy site? Will we find more of Lucy's skull? Do you think there's more of Lucy's jaw?’ Once the word was said, you could not change it.”
In both his speech and interview with journalists, Johanson also emphasised the lessons that the fossils can teach us today, in terms of climate challenges and co-existence with the rest of the natural world.
“Environments are being destroyed, insects are disappearing. The very world, which I call Mother Nature and which created us, is in danger. If the world that created us is in danger, we are in danger … I think the more we know about our place in nature, and the more we know about our origins in the place of nature, hopefully people will be more cautious, and will make some responsible decisions as we move forward.”
Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist and faculty member at the University of Chicago, also gave journalists his time and answered questions relating to the discovery of Selam in 2000. He explained what new information the fossilised remains of the infant (who died aged around 3 years old) brought to our understanding of human evolution:
“We know that she was of course an upright walker, like Lucy and others, but also had the ability to climb trees, which of course is important when you want to avoid predators or feed in the trees or shelter. But what is most important about Selam is because it is complete, even more complete than Lucy, and belongs to a child. We have now information about childhood, and the relationship between parents and children, over three million years ago. So not only do we know how she looked, but also we know how she behaved, and that is important for our understanding of the process of how we became human.”
The same question was posed about the origins of the name by which the remains are now known:
“When Selam was discovered, it was in a very remote part of the country, and there were just me and a couple of people with me. There was no celebration. But then to really understand what she represented, it took five to six years of going back to the site to find more pieces from that specimen, but also to extract it from the sandstone that was encasing her. So that took six years.
“So the first publication in Nature … was published in 2006. This is six years after the discovery. When I gave a press release on that day, concurrent with the publication of the Nature paper, I asked the people, ‘When you have a child, what do you do?’ But then while I was doing that, I was telling them how hard it was to make the discovery, because it is remote, it's hard and there were also some local conflicts in the place. So I said that the name should be short, easy to pronounce, representing peace, but also Ethiopia. Someone said, let's call her ‘Selam’, which means ‘peace’ in many Ethiopian languages.
“We had to wait to give her a name, because we didn't know that she was a girl or a boy, until we had access to CT scanning to understand what the teeth looked like. The wait was both scientific and also, I think, strategic.”
Visiting the exhibition
The exhibition People and Their Ancestors, which runs until October 23rd, does not make visitors wait to meet the two stars. Their imposing display case is the first thing that you see after passing through the doors, located beneath two standing models representing what Lucy and Selam may have looked like while they lived.
The exhibition then leads the visitor on through an impressive large display that puts authentic finds and further models in order, from oldest to youngest, ending with anatomically modern humans. The exhibits are accompanied by eye-catching screens and panels with information in Czech and English. That information does not shy away from the complex science and the debates surrounding the artefacts; the exact relationship of Lucy and Selam to Homo sapiens is much disputed, specifically whether Australopithecus afarensis is our ‘great-great-great grandmother’ or our ‘great-great-great-great aunt’.
In an adjacent room, finds from the National Museum’s own collection tell the story of later prehistory, as humans get to grips with tools and new ideas like farming. The specifically Czech contribution to anthropology and archaeology are emphasised, but the theme is also present of the fundamental unity and relatedness of humans, tracing all these achievements back to a handful of hominins in eastern Africa.
The exhibition is therefore structured in a way that Lucy and Selam, who greet visitors at the door, are located there not only as the star exhibits, but also as the chronological starting point for everything else on display and the story that they tell.
Why Prague?
With two such priceless exhibits, one only taken out of Ethiopia once before, the other never, how did the Czech National Museum achieve this exhibition? It was only through diplomacy and the support of the Ethiopian government that People and Their Ancestors has been made possible, as Selamawit Kassa, Ethiopia’s Minister of Tourism, explained:
“It cements the bilateral relations of Ethiopia and the Czech Republic. Two years ago, our Prime Minister, Dr. Abiy Ahmed, had an official visit here to the Czech Republic, and the two Prime Ministers had this discussion of showcasing Lucy and Selam in the centre of Europe. So, geographically, the Czech Republic is an ideal place to showcase, for all Europe, how these magnificent fossils came to be, and to tell our origin history. So, it is for the bilateral relations of the two countries and the geographical advantages, and also to cement that relationship that we have between our two friendly countries.”
One of the reasons for the choice of Prague is therefore geographical, its position in the heart of Europe. The National Museum team are hoping that visitors will come not only from across Czechia, but from all its European neighbours. News of the exhibition is certainly widespread; the minister reported that the Ethiopian people themselves are following the story. Although it has been reported that Ethiopian experts and members of the public were concerned by the transportation of the priceless and fragile exhibits, Minister Kassa reported a positive opinion back home:
“Ethiopians are very excited, because this is of course the first time that the two fossils, these very unique treasures, have travelled out of Ethiopia. This is a very unique experience for Ethiopians, and also the participation of the two exceptional, professionals who found these two fossils. This makes it a very unique experience for us and Ethiopians are very excited. We also would like to invite the people of the Czech Republic and all Europe to discover Ethiopia, to visit and to connect with their origin, as we are called the ‘land of origins’.”
When asked whether Ethiopia plans any further exhibitions with Lucy and Selam, the minister responded in the negative:
“This is a unique expression of friendship, a unique expression of trust and bilateral relations between Ethiopia and the Czech Republic. So as of now, there is no plan of showcasing them in any other country, because they are actually our most treasured fossils.”
People and Their Ancestors is therefore a once-in-a-generation event and opportunity for Czechia. In the splendour of the old building of the National Museum, in the heart of a great European city, the two central exhibits bring our thoughts back to the humble origins of what we as a species have achieved.
