Hello everyone,

I know I promised you some stories about my experiences with “terror birds.” I’m a little too young, I’m afraid, to have actually seen one, but many tales have come down from my ancestors.

This is the story that used to scare and inspire us the most.

One night, about 3 million years before I was born, a group of what you would call hominins were sitting around the fire, concerned that they had little food. No rain had fallen and the berries and leaves were few.

They heard a terrible crunching sound. It was getting louder. They scampered up the tallest tree and saw the terror bird. It was seven feet tall, weighed 300 points and had a 2-foot pointed beak.

It was moving quickly on its two three-toed legs. These predators could eat an animal  twice the size of our ancestors. Our ancestors were as still as they could be.

The terror bird thundered over to the tree. It was steps away from being able to open its hollow beak to pierce one of my ancestors and scoop him up into his mouth.

Terror bird skull compared with a modern day golden eagle and human skull.
- Ohio University.pierce one of the group and scoop it up into its mouth.

One of the females in the group, a new mother with a cub clinging to her fur, noticed that a dead log was lying within reach.

The timing had to be just right. She grunted softly to let the others know what she was about to do. She gave the cub to its father and picked up the log with both hands.

Just as the monster’s hollow beak was opened the widest, she rammed the log in as far as she could.

As the terror bird squawked and tried to get the log loose, she took the baby back and with the others leaped from tree to tree to escape. As they swung higher and higher and moved to safety, the universe recognized the courage and cooperation of the mother and her clan.

The sky rumbled and the rain began to fall. It fell for a moon. Once again there were leaves and berries and the clan survived.

My ancestor who spotted the log became known as Mother Who Saves.  After she died people continued to make offerings to her.

You probably know there are many theories about how the first terror birds got from South America to our part of Africa. More about that later!

Hi everyone,

As you can see from my recent tweet, a June 8 discovery of 200-year old bones in Belgium provided new clues about the events of the Battle of Waterloo and the soldiers who fought and died there, when Prussian and English troops defeated Napoleon. You can even see the bullet still nestled between to rib bones. What a find!

Soldier from 1815 Battle of Waterloo

My bones also tell some tales about how I lived and probably died. The wonderful people who found my bones speculated that I died quietly and wasn’t killed by animals. They are right that no animals were involved. My death seems almost boring compared to some.

There were no tooth marks on my bones, so I wasn’t the meal of a lion or saber-toothed cat. My skeleton was almost all together, so hyenas hadn’t taken my head and limbs in different directions. They think I might have been sick or drowned in what was then a stream where my pack often went to wash or just splash around.

We would also eat fruit, gather nuts and chew on grasses in that area. I see that a new discovery suggests that some other pre-humans who lived further south and about a million years after me ate tree bark, even though there was plenty of grass and leaves around!

Why would one eat bark and wood?  I tasted some once and it was very rough and bitter. The scientists could tell the tree-climbing pre-human, a young male, ate hard foods from the tiny bits of plant particles they found in his dental tartar and even tinier carbon isotopes in his tooth enamel.

2M years old, ate tree bark

None of my teeth were found because the front part of my skull was washed away, but you can believe me that I never ate another piece of bark!  After being buried under layers and layers of sand, dirt and other debris for more than 3 million years, the rains in Hadar washed all that away only a few years before my bones were found.

How did I die? Even I don’t know for sure. I was grooming a friend one minute and in the afterlife the next.

Not a bad end to what had been a full life. More about that when we chat again.

Hi everyone, I’m told it was a beautiful night around the campfire near the Awash River in Ethiopia when I got my name.

Awash River

Archeologists had found my bones scattered around and they were excited at the possibility that they might learn a lot from them.  The scattering is strange, since I remember those bones clearly as being part of my body, all nicely connected.

I suppose that in 3.2 million years a few things could have shifted. I’m told there was an arm bone fragment lying on a slope, a small skull, a thigh bone, some vertebrae and ribs, part of a pelvis and even a jaw bone. I want to thank the Institute of Human Origins for keeping track of all this, and especially Donald Johanson for putting me back together and writing about it.

But I digress. Everybody asks about my nickname.

Here’s how the story goes, according to Dr. Johanson. It was was evening and they were celebrating.

“The camp was rocking with excitement. That first night we never went to bed at all. 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 Diamonds’ went belting out into the night sky, and was played at full volume over and over again out of sheer exuberance.

“At some point during that unforgettable evening…the new fossil picked up the name of Lucy, and has been so known ever since.”

   Donald Johanson, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind

Since my official name is AL 288-1, you can imagine how happy I am that someone was playing such great music that night and all the archeologist who found my bones had a sense of humor.

Have a happy Solstice this week. Welcome back the sun and warmth. It is still one of my favorite holidays. And take a look at my tweet of the discovery that my ancestors left Asia for Africa even longer ago than people thought, maybe 37 million years ago. And you thought I was old.

Lucy

Hi everyone,

Some of you may have already met Lucy of Hadar over in Twitterland. She has taken over the Twitter feed that I formerly wrote and having a great time with it.

Lucy lived 3.2 million years ago. We know that because scientists used several highly sophisticated methods to date the ash in which an archeology team found her bones in the Hadar region of Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy’s Bones
© Institute of Human Origins

The archeologists were excited because they had found nearly 40 percent of Lucy’s skeleton and  could tell from her knee bone that she walked upright. At the time, that made her our oldest  human ancestor. The bone fragments were scattered and it took a few weeks to determine that they all belonged to one person.

“Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors you don’t get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone.”

–  Archeologist Donald Johanson, member of the team who discovered Lucy’s bones, a Chicago native, founder of the Institute of Human Origins at Berkeley University and author of several books on human origins.