A human body has 206 bones, but many of these are repeated. If you have the left femur from a specimen, you don’t need the right to know its dimensions. Strip out all the redundant bones, and the total you are left with is 120-what is called a half skeleton. Even by this fairly accommodating standard, and even counting the slightest fragment as a full bone, Lucy constituted only 28 percent of a half skeleton (and only about 20 percent of a full one).

In The Wisdom of the Bones, Alan Walker recounts how he once asked Johanson how he had come up with a figure of 40 percent. Johanson breezily replied that he had discounted the 106 bones of the hands and feet-more than half the body’s total, and a fairly important half, too, one would have thought, since Lucy’s principal defining attribute was the use of those hands and feet to deal with a changing world. At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn’t even actually known that she was a female. Her sex is merely presumed from her diminutive size.

Two years after Lucy’s discovery, at Laetoli in Tanzania Mary Leakey found footprints left by two individuals from-it is thought-the same family of hominids. The prints had been made when two australopithecines had walked through muddy ash following a volcanic eruption. The ash had later hardened, preserving the impressions of their feet for a distance of over twenty-three meters.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has an absorbing diorama that records the moment of their passing. It depicts life-sized re-creations of a male and a female walking side by side across the ancient African plain. They are hairy and chimplike in dimensions, but have a bearing and gait that suggest humanness. The most striking feature of the display is that the male holds his left arm protectively around the female’s shoulder. It is a tender and affecting gesture, suggestive of close bonding.

The tableau is done with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration that virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary. Almost every external aspect of the two figures-degree of hairiness, facial appendages (whether they had human noses or chimp noses), expressions, skin color, size and shape of the female’s breasts-is necessarily suppositional. We can’t even say that they were a couple. The female figure may in fact have been a child. Nor can we be certain that they were australopithecines. They are assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates.

I had been told that they were posed like that because during the building of the diorama the female figure kept toppling over, but Ian Tattersall insists with a laugh that the story is untrue. “Obviously we don’t know whether the male had his arm around the female or not, but we do know from the stride measurements that they were walking side by side and close together-close enough to be touching. It was quite an exposed area, so they were probably feeling vulnerable. That’s why we tried to give them slightly worried expressions.”

I asked him if he was troubled about the amount of license that was taken in reconstructing the figures. “It’s always a problem in making re-creations,” he agreed readily enough. “You wouldn’t believe how much discussion can go into deciding details like whether Neandertals had eyebrows or not. It was just the same for the Laetoli figures. We simply can’t know the details of what they looked like, but we can convey their size and posture and make some reasonable assumptions about their probable appearance. If I had it to do again, I think I might have made them just slightly more apelike and less human. These creatures weren’t humans. They were bipedal apes.”

Until very recently it was assumed that we were descended from Lucy and the Laetoli creatures, but now many authorities aren’t so sure. Although certain physical features (the teeth, for instance) suggest a possible link between us, other parts of the australopithecine anatomy are more troubling. In their book Extinct Humans, Tattersall and Schwartz point out that the upper portion of the human femur is very like that of the apes but not of the australopithecines; so if Lucy is in a direct line between apes and modern humans, it means we must have adopted an australopithecine femur for a million years or so, then gone back to an ape femur when we moved on to the next phase of our development. They believe, in fact, that not only was Lucy not our ancestor, she wasn’t even much of a walker.

“Lucy and her kind did not locomote in anything like the modern human fashion,” insists Tattersall. “Only when these hominids had to travel between arboreal habitats would they find themselves walking bipedally, ‘forced’ to do so by their own anatomies.” Johanson doesn’t accept this. “Lucy’s hips and the muscular arrangement of her pelvis,” he has written, “would have made it as hard for her to climb trees as it is for modern humans.”

Matters grew murkier still in 2001 and 2002 when four exceptional new specimens were found. One, discovered by Meave Leakey of the famous fossil-hunting family at Lake Turkana in Kenya and called Kenyanthropus platyops (“Kenyan flat-face”), is from about the same time as Lucy and raises the possibility that it was our ancestor and Lucy was an unsuccessful side branch. Also found in 2001 were Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba, dated at between 5.2 million and 5.8 million years old, and Orrorin tugenensis, thought to be 6 million years old, making it the oldest hominid yet found-but only for a brief while. In the summer of 2002 a French team working in the Djurab Desert of Chad (an area that had never before yielded ancient bones) found a hominid almost 7 million years old, which they labeled Sahelanthropus tchadensis. (Some critics believe that it was not human, but an early ape and therefore should be called Sahelpithecus.) All these were early creatures and quite primitive but they walked upright, and they were doing so far earlier than previously thought.

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and a greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover to get the baby’s head through such a tight space it must be born while its brain is still small-and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding.

All this is problematic enough when you are the intellectual master of the planet, but when you are a small, vulnerable australopithecine, with a brain about the size of an orange,[48] the risk must have been enormous.

So why did Lucy and her kind come down from the trees and out of the forests? Probably they had no choice. The slow rise of the Isthmus of Panama had cut the flow of waters from the Pacific into the Atlantic, diverting warming currents away from the Arctic and leading to the onset of an exceedingly sharp ice age in northern latitudes. In Africa, this would have produced seasonal drying and cooling, gradually turning jungle into savanna. “It was not so much that Lucy and her like left the forests,” John Gribbin has written, “but that the forests left them.”

But stepping out onto the open savanna also clearly left the early hominids much more exposed. An upright hominid could see better, but could also be seen better. Even now as a species, we are almost preposterously vulnerable in the wild. Nearly every large animal you can care to name is stronger, faster, and toothier than us. Faced with attack, modern humans have only two advantages. We have a good brain, with which we can devise strategies, and we have hands with which we can fling or brandish hurtful objects. We are the only creature that can harm at a distance. We can thus afford to be physically vulnerable.