It was a meeting I had been looking forward to for at least six weeks. Right through my yellow fever, typhoid, tetanus, polio and hepatitis A jabs, I was bolstered by the thought of seeing Lucy, face to face . . . well, face to bone.
We drove up to the security barrier at the Ethiopian National Museum in Addis Ababa, got out of the car to be searched, parked in the empty car park, and duly paid the 10 birr (£1) entrance fee for foreigners. Inside the exhibition hall, the sign "prehistory" in English led us to Lucy's glass coffin.
She lies in a thin layer of sand and grit, atop a metal stand, protected by glass in the only free-standing display cabinet in the basement. Her bones are beautifully arranged - she is stunning in her size and antiquity - but she is faceless (the only part of her skull to survive the millenniums is her distinctive lower jaw).
It's dingy, dreary and decidedly dull down there. Lucy's label is tired, curling back at the edges. In English it informs us the she is the "oldest complete human ancestor yet discovered anywhere in the world. Australopithecus afarensis".
Lucy, at 3.18 million years old, is 40 per cent complete. Her V-shaped jaw bone seems large in comparison to her delicate ribs. She was only 31/2
feet tall and weighed between 60 lb and 65 lb. A tiny lady, who walked upright (bipedal), was vegetarian and well suited to tree-swinging.
It seems she was a young but fully mature adult when she died. She was discovered in the Hadar valley in the Afar desert (hence afarensis), 100 miles north-east of Addis, in 1974. In Amharic, the national language, she is called Birkinesh.
Lucy's finder, Donald Johanson, and Maitland Edey describe the evening following the find in their book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. "The camp was rocking with excitement. That first night we never went to bed at all. We talked and talked. We drank beer after beer. There was a tape recorder in the camp and a tape of the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Dia- monds went belting out into the night sky, and was played at full volume over and over again out of sheer exuberance." Hence Lucy.
The human lineage split from the line that gave rise to chimpanzees and gorillas six to eight million years ago. The first evidence of Lucy's species dates to 3.9 million years ago; a skull found in 1994 (also at Hadar) and quickly dubbed "Son of Lucy" is only three million years old - the "youngest" known Australopithecus afarensis.
Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay Lucy on the Earth in Stasis, argues that these 900,000 years of stasis, when Lucy and her kin were the only hominid species we know about, are predictable. Mr Gould's hypothesis is that evolution largely consists of long periods of stasis punctuated by shorter periods of change, rather than a gradual continuous process. He also argues that human evolution was not linear but "bushy", with a number of species (not necessarily ancestral to us) coexisting at various times.
Many branches of that bush are represented by skulls in glass cases affixed to the walls of the Addis Ababa basement that contains Lucy. There is Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, Australopithecus boisei, homo habilis, homo erectus and "Bodo man", an early homo sapiens.
The skulls sit on wooden boxes, with occasional pencil drawings of ape-like men stuck to the back of the cases. Ancient choppers and scrapers fill another case. There are three black-and-white photographs, mounted on board, showing cave drawings of bison at Hadar, a rock drawing at Omoa and a rock carving elsewhere (the label has faded). A land tortoise from Hadar (pliocene, 3-3.4 million years old) sits on a box on the floor. A few charts and that's it.
In a country where eight million people may need food aid this year, priorities must, it seems, be with the living rather than the long, long dead. However, the more luxurious accommodation on the museum's ground floor is reserved for costumes and thrones, while the top two floors house paintings and a variety of more recent artefacts (agricultural implements, musical instruments, crafts). In any First World museum lucky enough to house a collection such as Lucy and her various descendants she would surely be the star attraction.