I had the good fortune a few years ago to be able to visit the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. It is a wonderful place, that does such a great job of bringing its exhibits to life. I found my way to the Hall of Human Origins, where they have recreated the Laoteli footprints from Tanzania. These are tracks discovered in 1978, but thought to have been made 3.6 million years ago by three members of Australopithecus afarensis, an early human ancestor.
They've set scale casts of the footprints into the floor as you enter the hall. I found it incredibly moving to trace these steps, and notice that they were roughly the same size as my own feet.
A bit further on, you can see a replica skeleton of 'Lucy' the most famous Australopithecus. Apparently the team who found her relatively complete skeleton in Ethiopia named her after the Beatles song. It was only recently, back in Leeds, that it was pointed out to me how inappropriate this name is.
Joe Williams, of Heritage Corner Leeds, led me and others on a Black History Walk to celebrate Black History Month (October in the UK). He opened by noting that one of the tour's goals is to mitigate the erasure of Blackness from British History. And as his first example pointed out that this goes all the way back to Human History, way back before the British Isles existed as a nation. What sense does it make that one of the very first humans known to have walked the earth was given an English name?
We all know that humans evolved in Africa. That White features evolved only much later. Paleoanthropologists from Lucy's homeland, Ethiopia, chose the Amharic name 'Dink'inesh', and in 2013 she went home to the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.
It hit me hard to realise I hadn't previously questionned the decency of her name. For White scientists to go and loot former colonies was pretty normal in the 1970s. But to appropriate her very being with a name take from a song by the Whitest band ever, in a horrible echo of the slave names given to those whose culture and history was stolen from them.......yuck.
Her new name means 'You are amazing' and I will try to remember not to use the old one again.
