Abram and Lucy

What can we learn from the study of our common spiritual ancestor?

"As I looked up the slopes to my left, I

saw bits of the skull, a chunk of jaw, a couple of vertebrae."

Who would make such a grisly remark? A police investigator searching for a murder victim? A first responder excavating human remains at Ground Zero? A grave-robber?

Wrong on all counts. And it's not as grisly as you may think. The human remains this man is describing are 3.2 million years old.

The words were spoken by Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist who one day in 1974 was digging in a remote spot in the Ethiopian desert. He was recounting his discovery of the earliest reasonably complete human skeleton ever found, a female.

As Johanson and his companions made their way back to camp, the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was blaring from a portable cassette player. "Why don't you call it Lucy?" suggested one of his co-workers.

So, Lucy she became. Ever since, anthropologists have considered her to be the oldest potential common ancestor of us all.


Our common spiritual...