What links this Ethiopian postage stamp, the Trojan War, Thomas the Tank Engine and Pink Floyd? Yes, this is a train of connections worthy of BBC’s Only Connect quiz. It is a story that starts in the Pliocene Epoch and will run until the spring of 2033, and featuring the launch from Cape Canaveral on 16 October 2021 of Lucy, a spacecraft which over the next 12 years will be travelling to a series of close encounters with asteroids.
Let’s start from some beginnings… In 1974 a team of archaeologists working in the North-East extremity of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, in the Ethiopian province of Afar, uncovered one of the most important discoveries in the story of human evolution. It was about 40% of a skeleton of a small adult female hominin about 3.2 million years old. There was evidence that she walked (at least some of the time) on two legs, making the find our oldest bipedal ancestor. She was later identified as the first specimen of a new species called Australopithecus afarensis. In the Amharic language of Ethiopia, she is called “Dinkenesh”, which means “you are marvellous”. I have seen the (plaster reproduction) of the skeleton on display in the Ethiopian National Museum near Addis Ababa University, which was marvellous indeed. Ethiopia is very proud of their favourite daughter, as illustrated by the special stamp issued in 1986.
But outside of Ethiopia “Dinkenesh” is known as “Lucy”. The story, as told by Robin Derricourt in his excellent book Inventing Africa, is that in the evening of 24 November 1974 after the team led by Donald Johanson made this discovery of a lifetime, someone played the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds over and over in the camp. Johanson is one of the prominent names in 20th century paleoanthropology alongside the Leakey family, Raymond Dart etc., and amongst his achievements and accolades he was honoured by the naming of an asteroid.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which appeared on the 1967 Beatles record Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was named after a nursery school portrait by John Lennon’s son Julian. Ringo Starr was at Lennon’s house in Weybridge to witness the moment when young Jules (“Hey Jules…”) handed it over to his proud Dad, inspiring him to write a track on the 55x platinum-selling album. Julian’s little friend was Lucy O’Donnell with whom, we are told, he renewed his friendship shortly before she died in 2009. The artwork was neither lost nor thrown away, but after it adorned – we can imagine – a Beatle’s fridge door, it is now owned by Dave Gilmour the guitarist of Pink Floyd. The band name-dropped Lucy in the track Let There Be More Light from their 1968 album A Saucer Full of Secrets.
Meanwhile, Ringo Starr (famous of course as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine, but previously “not even the best drummer in the Beatles” according to John Lennon!) was a special guest of NASA as Lucy was launched into the sky in October, where Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was played in Mission Control. The craft, named after the famous fossil, is carrying a bevy of scientific instruments to study each asteroid, which are in turn fossils of the early stages of planetary formation. She is headed for two groups of asteroids which orbit the sun in formation with Jupiter, collectively known as the Trojans. (One group is the “Greek Camp” and the other the “Trojan Camp”, as if forever readying for the climax of Homer’s Iliad: the sack of Troy.) But on the way to the orbit of Jupiter, Lucy will visit one other asteroid in 2025: none other than 52246 Donaldjohanson, named after the discoverer of Lucy!
Links
- Stamp Catalogue: North-East Africa, 1st Edition, Stanley Gibbons, 2014 (probably the most consulted book in the house!)
- Only Connect on BBC iPlayer (probably our favourite quiz show) – a programme so “arch” that when the first series was criticised for labelling questions with Greek letters, the programme makers responded by changing them to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Oh yes!
- NASA’s Lucy on wikipedia
- Robin Derricourt, Inventing Africa: History, Archaeology and Ideas, Pluto Press, 2011 (see forthcoming review…)
- Pink Floyd Let There Be More Light on YouTube
Image credits
- Postage stamp of Ethiopia:1986 2 Birr – 12th Anniversary of Discovery of Oldest known Hominid Skeleton (from own collection)
- Thomas the Tank Engine (based on the 0-6-0 E2 Class of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway) By http://www.hitnewsonline.com/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13878653
- Mission Lucy insignia: By National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) · Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) – Published source: http://lucy.swri.edu/2020/05/18/LucyInsignia.html “Inspiration Links The Beatles, a Fossil and a NASA Mission” by NASA Direct source: Image hosted by swri.edu, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59546610
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