Originally published 6 June 1994
Hey, Tony baby, the concept is a knockout.
A Hollywood movie about the earliest human. Well, maybe she wasn’t exactly human yet, but she is certainly the earliest human ancestor with a name.
Lucy. Everyone’s heard of Lucy. Australopithecus afarensis. The oldest partially-complete fossil skeleton ever dug out of the ground. I’m telling ya, Tony, it’s a sure thing.
We’ll bring her back to life. A gorgeous babe in a skimpy prehistoric outfit. Think of Daryl Hannah in Clan of the Cave Bear. Think of Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC. The audiences will love it!
We’ll call it I Love Lucy: Three Million Years BC.
Prehistoric is in, Tony. In BIG. We’ll combine the scientific interest of Jurassic Park with the pop appeal of The Flintstones. Yabba-dabba-doo. A summer blockbuster. Lucy in the bank with diamonds.
There’s only one problem, Tony. I’m having trouble with the science consultants.
These guys can’t agree on anything. All they do is fight about the fossil bones. We’re in pre-production and the script is a mess.
What? Forget the science and camp it up? No, Tony, no. I thought we had agreed. If the film is just a bunch of pretty people running around in fur bikinis the critics will take us apart. Spielberg showed what a little scientific gloss can do. Parents will send their kids for an education. The kids will go for the action.
We’ve got terrific action in the script, Tony. Predatory cheetahs. Herds of wild hippos. Erupting volcanoes. Now if only we can get the scientific consultants to agree on Lucy.
I’m telling you, Tony, they can’t even agree about how she walked.
This anthropologist Donald Johanson, one of the ones who discovered her, swears Lucy walked upright, like you and me. Bases his opinion on the pelvis and leg bones, which he says look almost modern. And then there’s those two-footed fossil footprints that Mary Leakey found in Tanzania; they date from about Lucy’s time.
So some of our consultants are saying, “She stands upright.”
The others say she shuffled along like an ape and spent most of her time in the trees. That anatomist Randall Susman points out that Lucy’s toes were a third longer than modern toes. He made himself a pair of shoes shaped like Lucy’s feet, and found out that it was like walking in scuba fins. He says Lucy must have loped with a high-stepping gait to avoid dragging her toes.
And Lucy’s lower arm bones are longer than her upper arms. Just what you’d expect for swinging in trees.
Then that other anatomist, Fred Spoor, has been using x‑rays to examine the inner ear canals of fossil skulls. We use our inner ears for balance, Tony, to keep us on our feet. Turns out that Lucy’s inner ears are more like a chimp’s than a modern human’s.
So, do we have our actors swinging in the trees or walking upright on the ground?
That’s only part of it. I’m telling you, Tony, these anthropologists fight about everything.
For example: Was Lucy’s crowd alone, or was there another kind of prehuman around?
Seems there are two bunches of bones from Lucy’s time, some bigger than the others. Johanson and his supporters think the two sets of bones belong to males and females respectively — sexual dimorphism, they call it. Richard Leakey, Todd Olson, and others believe there were two separate species of ape-humans running around Africa three million years ago.
We gotta sort this out, Tony. One species or two? The scriptwriters need an answer.
Every meeting with our scientific consultants ends in a Donnybrook. Today they were fighting over a new Australopithecus afarensis skull that Johanson and his colleagues found in Ethiopia, the first Lucy-like skull that is almost complete.
An earlier reconstruction of Lucy’s skull had been put together from lots of little bone fragments — like a jigsaw puzzle. The two-species crowd of anthropologists claimed the fragments came from two kinds of pre-humans, jumbled up together. But the new skull proves the jigsaw puzzle was put together correctly, say Johanson and his friends.
The worst of it, Tony, is figuring out where Lucy fits in human ancestry. She’s got a tiny apelike brain, but many anatomical features like modern humans; that much is clear. But nobody, absolutely nobody seems to agree on what the human family tree looks like.
I’m telling you, Tony, these anthropologists need more bones and fewer squabbles.
But there’s one thing our scientific consultants do agree on, Tony. They all agree that Lucy was only three-and-a-half feet tall.
And we’ve signed Julia Roberts to play her.
Tell me, Tony. How do I tell Julia Roberts that she’s too tall for the role?
