Under The Microscope

LUCY'S CHILD, The Discovery Of A Human Ancestor, by Donald Johanson and James Shreeve; Viking, 1989; 318 pages; UK16.99

You know how it is with sequels. Either you wait around for years for one, and when it arrives you are disappointed; or it arrives out of the blue and it's a pleasant surprise.

Thus, when Lucy's Child arrived out of the blue, I was getting ready to be pleasantly surprised. I was particularly taken by its predecessor, Lucy -- I've had a soft spot for paleoanthropology ever since. The content looked promising too. The first discovery of large amounts of a skeleton of Homo habilis, the bickerings and snappings of rival paleontologists, and a bit of cutting-edge discussion on the social behaviour of early hominids, should have added up to a winner. Unfortunately, my rule broke down.

Part of the problem is that it suffers by comparison with Lucy. In order to give first-time readers some idea of the context of the discoveries described, it has to go over much the same ground as the former volume. For someone who has read that book, the reaction is "yes, well, get on with it then". Obviously the authors were aware of this problem -- they tried to cure it by choosing a rather dramatic departure from Lucy's style.

Welcome to gonzo paleantology. It isn't quite Raoul Duke and a 500- pound Samoan attorney up the Olduvai with pickaxes and 500 tabs of premium-grade LSD, but anyone could be forgiven for wondering if Hunter S. Thompson was a story consultant. The trouble is that for gonzo-style accounts to work, the action has to keep motoring. Not enough really happens in Lucy's Child. When one of the main points of the book is that finding fossils can be a long, hard difficult, exasperating and boring enterprise, using exciting first-person commentary just ends up looking silly. Johanson and Shreeve deserve smacks on wrists for making finding fossils sound a lot less interesting than drugs.

I'm also quite prepared to believe that the digging team had conversations roughly equivalent to the ones that appear in the book. Yet I found that the suspension of disbelief involved in reading the "factional" conversations sat uneasily with the facts the book is trying to convey.

It's sad really. Some of the individual episodes are very funny, such as the way Johanson gained funding for the expedition by winning an celebrity amateur cooking contest. Some are fascinating, such as the debates over early hominid family trees. Some sections are educational. All the parts of a great work of popular science are there, but, for one reason or another, the whole suffers. Never mind. Perhaps if I wait expectantly for the sequel for Lucy's Children I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Tony Smith, NZSM