Lucy Lives: A Novel Look At Early Human Evolution

Lucy is an Australopithecus afarensis who is over three million years old. Her skeleton was discovered in 1974 by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, and is the most famous fossil ever found. This is a novel about Lucy’s life and times, her friends and enemies, her struggles to survive in a wild, primitive world, her dreams of a better life free of the harsh social structure of her adoptive group.

Although the story is fiction, each chapter includes a brief nonfictional essay called a Parentheticus considering scientific aspects of the events chronicled. Together, the story and the science—a special kind of science fiction—reveal an early stage of human evolution in action, by examining cultural, technological, intellectual, political, sexual, and environmental transformations that were increasingly separating hominids from their ape ancestors. Those unique adaptations, on the rise in Lucy’s time, would eventually become the defining features of modern humans, setting us apart from the rest of nature.

The underlying subject is evolution, but the heart of Lucy Lives is a story of adventure, ingenuity, determination, and courage. It is a story of endurance, too, as Lucy has 'outlived' her contemporaries by thousands of millennia.