Fifty years ago, scientists discovered a nearly complete fossilized skull and hundreds of pieces of bone from a 3.2-million-year-old female specimen of the genus Australopithecus afarensis, often described as ‘the mother of us all’. During a celebration after her discovery, she was named ‘Lucy’ after the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.
Although Lucy has solved a number of evolutionary riddles, her appearance remains an ancestral secret.
Popular renderings dress her in thick, reddish-brown fur, with her face, hands, feet and breasts peeking out from the denser undergrowth.
This furry photo of Lucy may turn out to be wrong.
Technological advances in genetic analysis suggest that Lucy may have been naked, or at least much more thinly veiled.
According to the co-evolutionary story of humans and their lice, our direct ancestors lost most of their body fur 3 to 4 million years ago and did not put on clothing until 83,000 to 170,000 years ago.
This means that early humans and their ancestors were simply naked for more than 2.5 million years.
As a philosopher, I am interested in how modern culture influences representations of the past. And the way Lucy is depicted in newspapers, textbooks and museums may say more about us than it does about her.
From nakedness to shame
The loss of body hair in early humans was likely influenced by a combination of factors, including thermoregulation, delayed physiological development, attracting sexual partners, and fighting off parasites. Environmental, social and cultural factors may have encouraged the eventual adoption of clothing.
Both areas of research—on when and why hominids shed their body hair and when and why they eventually got dressed—highlight the enormous size of the brain, which takes years to nourish and requires a disproportionate amount of energy to maintain compared to other parts of the human body. the body.
Because human babies require a long period of care before they can survive on their own, evolutionary interdisciplinary researchers have theorized that early humans adopted the strategy of pair bonding: a man and a woman working together after forming a strong affinity for each other. Working together makes it easier for the two to handle years of parental care.
However, pair bonding comes with risks.
Because people are social and live in large groups, they will undoubtedly be tempted to break the pact of monogamy, which would make it more difficult to raise children.
A mechanism was needed to safeguard the socio-sexual pact. That mechanism was probably shame.
In the documentary “What’s the problem with nudity?” Evolutionary anthropologist Daniel MT Fessler explains the evolution of shame: “The human body is an ultimate sexual advertisement… Nudity threatens the basic social contract because it is an invitation to defect… Shame encourages us to remain faithful to our partners and share the responsibility of raising our children.”
Boundaries between body and world
Humans, aptly described as ‘naked apes’, are unique for their lack of fur and their systematic adoption of clothing. Only by banning nudity did ‘nudity’ become a reality.
As human civilization developed, measures must have been put in place to enforce the social contract – punishments, laws, social dictates – especially with regard to women.
Thus the relationship of shame with human nakedness was born. Being naked means violating social norms and regulations. That’s why you tend to feel ashamed.
What counts as nudity in one context may not necessarily be the case in another.
Bare ankles in Victorian England, for example, caused a scandal. Nowadays, bare tops on a beach in the French Mediterranean are common.
When it comes to nudity, art doesn’t necessarily imitate life.
In his critique of the European oil painting tradition, art critic John Berger distinguishes between nudity – ‘being oneself’ without clothes – and ‘the nude’, an art form that transforms a woman’s naked body into a pleasurable spectacle for men.
Feminist critics such as Ruth Barcan complicated Berger’s distinction between nudity and nudity, emphasizing that nudity is already shaped by idealized representations.
In ‘Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy’ Barcan shows how nudity is not a neutral state, but is charged with meaning and expectations. She describes “feeling naked” as “the heightened perception of temperature and air movement, the loss of the familiar boundary between body and world, as well as the effects of the actual gaze of others” or “the internalized gaze of an imagined other.” ”
Nudity can evoke a spectrum of feelings – from eroticism and intimacy to vulnerability, fear and shame. But there is no such thing as nudity outside of social norms and cultural practices.
Lucy’s Veils
Regardless of the density of her fur, Lucy was not naked.
But just as the nude is a kind of dress, Lucy has been presented since her discovery in a way that reflects historical assumptions about motherhood and the nuclear family. For example, Lucy is depicted alone with a male companion or with a male companion and children. Her facial expressions are warm and content or protective, reflecting idealized images of motherhood.
The modern quest to visualize our distant ancestors has been criticized as a kind of “erotic fantasy science,” in which scientists try to fill in the blanks of the past based on their own assumptions about women, men, and their relationships with each other.
In their 2021 paper “Visual Depictions of Our Evolutionary Past,” an interdisciplinary team of researchers tried a different approach. They describe their own reconstruction of the Lucy fossil, detailing their methods, the relationship between art and science, and decisions made to fill gaps in scientific knowledge.
Their process contrasts with other hominin reconstructions, which often lack strong empirical justifications and perpetuate misogynistic and racial misconceptions about human evolution. Historically, illustrations of the stages of human evolution have tended to culminate in a white European man. And many reconstructions of female hominids exaggerate features offensively associated with black women.
One of the co-authors of ‘Visual Depictions’, sculptor Gabriel Vinas, offers a visual illumination of Lucy’s reconstruction in ‘Santa Lucia’ – a marble sculpture of Lucy as a naked figure draped in translucent cloth, depicting the artist’s own insecurities and represents Lucy’s. mysterious appearance.
The Veiled Lucy speaks to the complex relationships between nudity, covering, sex and shame. But it also depicts Lucy as a veiled virgin, a figure revered for sexual “purity.”
And yet I can’t help but imagine Lucy beyond the fabric, a Lucy who is neither airborne with diamonds nor frozen in maternal idealization – a Lucy who goes “Apeshit” about the veils being cast over her cast, a Lucy who might be forced to wear a dress. a Guerrilla Girls mask, if anything.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Stacy Keltner, Kennesaw State University
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Stacy Keltner does not work for, consult with, own stock in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.