The Vancouver airport was seasonally festive. A man dressed as Santa was driven around in an airport trolley by a woman in an elf costume. He ho-ho-ho’ed at all the travellers, stopping for photos and hugging the children. A woman stood in front of a microphone crooning Christmas tunes. Most people were going to spend the holidays with family. Some were probably escaping the celebrations to go and relax on a beach somewhere, perhaps Hawaii or Mexico. I was going to spend three weeks in Ethiopia with my friend Kate. We were trading in our version of Christmas for Ethiopian Ganna. Leaving the cold and dark of the North for the sun and warmth of sub-Saharan Africa.

It is a very long flight from Vancouver to Addis Ababa. The first leg of the journey, Vancouver to Frankfurt, arches up and over the Arctic circle to reach Europe. During car trips through the Rocky Mountains when I was a child, I would imagine that I was a giant and I was running atop the mountain peaks alongside the car. I still do that on airplanes. I imagine that I’m running through British Columbia right up to the edge of the Northwest Territories; taking a big flying leap off the coast of Greenland to the shores of Norway; playing hopscotch over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

I arrived at the Addis Ababa airport late at night, a full 24 hours after I’d left Vancouver,  exhausted, discombobulated, excited. Stepping into the chaos of the arrivals hall felt like an odd sort of homecoming. The ghosts of trips past floated through my mind. Outside the airport doors, people were shivering and wearing bulky coats. It was a pleasantly cool evening, for someone who’d come from the city of freezing rain. The air was dry and heavy with dust.

Kate arrived early the next morning. Her luggage did not arrive with her. Another casualty of Ethiopian Airlines. They encourage you to fly into the country on Ethiopian Airlines with a substantial discount on domestic flights once you’re there. But they often lose your luggage. They assured her it would come in on the next flight.

Our hotel was in Bole, an affluent neighbourhood of Addis next to the airport; we could see the airport from one window of our room. A small children’s carnival twirled and twittered from another window. The first item on our agenda was to go see Lucy the Missing Link at the National Museum of Ethiopia. The city was overwhelming at first. It was hot and teeming with people and noise. I’d forgotten what it was like being in a place where you stick out from the crowd and attract a lot of stares and comments and attention. It reminded me of India: a kaleidoscope of humanity, loud and vibrant.

 

The National Museum of Ethiopia is quite unassuming for a place that houses the fossils of human ancestry. The basement, where the Lucy replicas are displayed, is dim and dusty and has a chill in the air. There are a collection of glass cases with various animal fossils, like pigs, monkeys, horses, rhinos and giraffes. Some of complete skulls or skeletons but most are just pieces, fragments of skulls, femurs and teeth. The detritus of millennia.

Lucy is presented with little fanfare, another glass case of fragments like all the others. There are two replicas: an upright completed skeleton in one case and another, replicas of the 40% of the skeleton that was recovered, lying there like an unfinished puzzle. The real fossils are safely tucked away in the recesses of the museum.

Lucy, so named for the song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ that was playing in the camp during the dig, is also called Dinkinesh which means “you are marvellous” in Amharic. She was found in 1974 in the Awash Valley in the Afar Triangle, part of the Great Rift Valley in northern Ethiopia. The Afar Triangle is where the earliest hominin fossils were found, known as the cradle of human evolution. Lucy is 3.2 million years old, belonging to the species Australopithecus afarensis and one of the oldest known ancestors of the human species. There is evidence that she walked upright on her two feet; possibly, she lived in the trees. She is small, the size of a young child, and in the upright replica, her face is lifted upwards, as though when she died, she was looking up at the stars.

There are other hominin fossils that I hadn’t heard of before. Selam (peace in Amharic), also called “Lucy’s baby” or “the first child”, is a three-year-old girl hominin of the species Australopithecus afarensis, discovered in the Afar Depression, a few miles from where Lucy was found. She is 3.3 million years old, older than Lucy.

And there is Ardi, of the species Ardipithecus ramidus; another tiny human-ish female. She is 4.4 million years old and was also found in the Awash Valley. She was found in 1994, but her significance wasn’t revealed in scientific literature until 2009. Her remains suggest that humans underwent another evolutionary stage more than a million years before Lucy existed. There is evidence that she was both bipedal and quadrupedal when in the trees. I don’t know much about archeology, but it’s interesting that Lucy is still the main evolutionary celebrity when Ardi and Selam are also clearly important links in our history.

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The following day, when repeated phone calls to the lost luggage department of the airport proved to be fruitless, we went back to the airport to see if Kate would have more luck in person. Much easier than anticipated, we snaked through the airport into the baggage claim unnoticed. Kate’s bag was lying on the floor next to a pile of other person-less luggage. She picked up her bag, looked around to see if anyone would object or comment, and when no one did, we walked back out of the airport and into the chaos.