Lucy

You are kneeling in hot gravel, and in front of you a knee is sticking out of the ground. Not a whole skeleton — nothing that neat. Just a knee, and nearby a piece of jaw, and a few ribs, and a tiny cup of a skull. Forty percent of a person who died three and a half million years ago and then slowly became part of the hillside. The team that found her played 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' on the camp tape recorder that night, so that's the name she got. Lucy. As if she were someone who'd wandered off and they'd finally found her. And in a way, that's exactly right. Lucy walked upright. Not like a chimp, knuckles dragging — she walked the way you walked here this morning, heel to toe, spine straight, hands free. She was the size of a child and her brain was smaller than a fist. And the thing that shook everyone who looked at her bones wasn't the walking. It was the timing. She walked upright three million years before anything big happened to the brain. That was the wrong order. Every story the scientists had told about how we became human — tools made the hands free, free hands grew the brain, big brain built the body upright — every single story had the steps backwards. Lucy had been walking for a million years before she started thinking. The skeleton didn't confirm the story. It broke it.