Anthropology chair found 'Lucy's Daughter'

David Perlman, [San Francisco Chronicle] July 1, 2008

Headlines around the world hailed the fossils as "Lucy's Child" and "Lucy's Daughter" when anthropologists first reported finding the skull and bones of a 3-year-old girl who lived and died more than 3.3 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia's Afar Desert.

"But she lived at least 150,000 years before Lucy was ever born, so that little girl couldn't ever have been any child of Lucy," said anthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged with a laugh.

"Yet she certainly belonged to Lucy's lineage - and they both lived in what we can now call the cradle of mankind."

Lucy, of course, is the most famous fossil ever discovered. Her bones were found in Ethiopia in 1974, and she gave scientists fresh evidence for a crucial epoch in evolution when chimplike creatures first walked upright along the many-branched paths toward modern humans.

Zeresenay and his colleagues had found their 3-year-old child's bones in 2000, and the discovery swiftly made his career. Her bones provided the most nearly complete skeleton of her species ever unearthed, and she was the first to offer such rich insights into the form and function of all her hominid kind as infants - the species called Australopithecus afarensis.

Zeresenay (Ethiopians use first names as their formal names) named her Selam, which means "peace" in the Amharic language, and her bones are now safely under study by his team in his country's National Museum in Addis Ababa.

Now Zeresenay lives in Woodside with his wife, whose name is also Selam, and their daughter Alula, who by coincidence is also nearly 3. He has just been named chairman of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences, and his office - still barely furnished, but with his computer up and running - is in the academy's dramatic new building in Golden Gate Park.

After Nina Jablonski, then the academy's renowned chair of anthropology, announced she was leaving to become a professor at Penn State University in 2007, academy leaders advertised in scientific journals that the post was open. Thirty scientists applied, and after search committee members vetted the records of them all and interviewed several, they chose the Ethiopian scientist from Germany.

His new post makes him curator of more than 17,000 anthropology specimens and artifacts - a collection representing just about every kind of culture in the world - Native American ceremonial dolls, Japanese folk toys, ancient Mayan ceramics, Inupiat art from Alaska and much, much more.

Many of those objects will be on public view from time to time after the new academy opens on Sept. 27, and meanwhile Zeresenay - everyone at the academy calls him Zeray - is boning up on the unfamiliar.

"I don't necessarily specialize in Native American culture," he conceded with a grin during an interview, "or Japanese dolls, but I'm certainly interested in what makes us all human - and how we and our cultures have changed over time. So part of my job here is to find new ways of bringing all the fascinating material from our anthropology collections out where visitors can see them and understand how they reflect the cultures of so many different people."

Zeresenay, 39, was born in Axum, the Ethiopian city where the biblical Ark of the Covenant is believed to lie hidden in an ancient church and where the Queen of Sheba was supposedly born.

He studied at the University of Paris, wrote his doctoral thesis in French, and was back in Ethiopia as a research fellow at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Human Evolutionary Studies in Leipzig in December 2000. That's when he and a colleague first spotted the fossil skull's tiny face peering, eye sockets up, from a block of sandstone on the desert floor.

The barren, rocky site, called Dikika, is about 6 miles from the Hadar site where Lucy was found, and Zeresenay's tiny prehuman creature has already added fresh insights into the infancy of pre-humans, he said. Her lower-leg development indicates that even at the early age 3 she could probably walk upright, while her arm bones confirm that her tribe might have still retained a chimp's ability to climb trees and swing from branches - a neat way to escape quickly from predators prowling the ground.

Even while he is curator at the academy, Zeresenay will continue his fossil hunting in Ethiopia. He is heading back to Dikika in January - studying the region's geology and the varied animals that lived there - and, hopefully, finding the fossil bones of more Australopithecines, young or old. They might even be Salem's parents, or Lucy's other relatives - who knows?