With Lucy, Obama Sees New Meaning in Family Visit to Africa
The president was given an audience with the famous fossil.
Obama touches a bone fragment of “Lucy,” who was estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago, alongside Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn (right) and Zeresenay Alemseged (second left), head of the California Academy of Sciences, prior to a State Dinner at the National Palace in Addis Ababa on July 27.
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“Amazing,” President Barack Obama remarked, and it was hard to disagree.
Before him on a table in Ethiopia’s National Palace, neat, in open wood boxes, lay “Lucy,” aka AL-288-1, the 40-percent complete remains of a female human ancestor who lived 3.2 millions years ago, and, who at the time of her discovery in Ethiopia in 1974 by an American, represented the most complete, ancient tie to humankind.