National Geographic: Mysteries of Mankind Page #4

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Here was a significant portion

of a skeleton a creature

with some very ape like features

that walked upright.

Lucy had an ape like brain,

a human like skeleton,

and teeth both ape and human like

a startling mixture of traits.

Yet clearly she was a hominid,

a member of the family of man.

Returning to Hadar the following year,

the team combed the slopes hoping

to discover newly exposed fossils.

They never dreamed they would find

anything as exciting as Lucy.

But the Johanson luck proved even

better than the year before.

We have the femur and

the foot and the knee!

They had come across the

first fragments of 13 individuals,

possibly members of the same band.

They may have all perished together

perhaps in a flash flood.

The fossils from Hadar

and similar ones from Tanzania

represent from 35 to 65 individuals.

Based on the abundant evidence,

Johanson and

his colleagues felt confident

in announcing an entirely new species.

They called it

Australopithecus afarensis

and put forth

the still controversial idea

that it is the common ancestor

to other Australopithecines

who eventually died out,

as well as the line

that led to true humans.

In the laboratory fragments

of skulls and iaws

from several males were combined

into a composite plaster skull

by Johanson's colleague, Dr. Tim White.

After initial discovery and analysis

scientists rarely work

with an original, fragile fossil.

In fact,

the fossils are usually returned

to the country where they were found.

But these durable casts

are exact replicas

down to the most minute details.

In Alexandria, Virginia,

the composite skull begins

a magical transformation

in the hands of anthropologist

turned artist, John Gurche.

Gurche has been fascinated with

human evolution since childhood.

Today he combines the talents

of an anatomist

with those of a master sculptor.

His workroom is a cross

between an artist's studio

and a scientific laboratory.

Placing the eyes

is often a special moment.

I base the position of the eyes

on scientific data,

but there's also often a mystical side

of it as well.

That is often the moment when I begin

to feel that I'm being watched

by the thing I'm working on

that it is not so much a thing

of clay and plaster,

but is actually a living being.

What I really want to do is get

at the human past,

and having the scientific data

behind me

makes it much more rewarding for me

because I can believe

in what I'm doing.

I can believe that the face

that's developing

in front of me is very much like

the face

of the individual that it

actually belonged to.

The really fascinating thing

about working

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