Fifty years ago, scientists discovered an almost complete fossilized skull and hundreds of bone fragments of a 3.2-million-year-old female specimen of the genus Australopithecus afarensis, often described as “the mother of us all”. During the celebration following her discovery, she was named “Lucy” after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
Although Lucy has solved some evolutionary puzzles, her appearance remains an ancestral mystery.
A popular rendition dresses her in thick, reddish-brown fur, with her face, arms, legs and breasts peeking out from the thicker thickets.
This furry picture of Lucy, it turns out, might be wrong.
Technological advances in genetic analysis suggest that Lucy may have been naked, or at least much more thinly veiled.
According to the coevolutionary story of humans and their lice, our immediate ancestors lost most of their body fur between 3 and 4 million years ago and only wore clothing between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago.
This means that for more than 2.5 million years the first humans and their ancestors were simply naked.
As a philosopher, I am interested in how modern culture influences representations of the past. And the way Lucy has been portrayed in newspapers, textbooks and museums may say more about us than it does about her.
From nudity to shame
The loss of body hair in early humans was probably influenced by a combination of factors, including thermoregulation, delayed physiological development, attraction of sexual partners, and repelling parasites. Environmental, social and cultural factors may have supported the eventual adoption of clothing.
Both areas of research—when and why hominins shed body hair and when and why they eventually clothed themselves—highlight the sheer size of the brain, which takes years to nourish and requires a disproportionate amount of energy to maintain compared to other parts of the body.
Because human babies require a long period of care before they can survive on their own, evolutionary interdisciplinary researchers theorized that early humans adopted a pair-bonding strategy—a male and female bond after developing a strong affinity for each other. Working together makes the years of parenting easier for the two of them to handle.
Pairing brings risks, however.
Because humans are gregarious and live in large groups, they must be tempted to break the pact of monogamy, which would make raising children more difficult.
Some mechanism was needed to ensure the socio-sexual pact. That mechanism was probably a shame.
In the documentary “What’s the Problem with Nudity?”, evolutionary anthropologist Daniel MT Fessler explains the evolution of shame: “The human body is the ultimate sexual advertisement… Nudity is a threat to the basic social contract because it is an invitation to defection… Shame encourages us to remain faithful to our partners and shared the responsibility of raising our children.”
The boundary between the body and the world
Aptly described as “naked apes”, humans are unique in their lack of fur and systematic adoption of clothing. Only by banning nudity did “nudity” become a reality.
As human civilization developed, measures had to be put in place to enforce the social contract—repressive punishments, laws, social orders—particularly with regard to women.
Thus was born the relationship of shame to human nudity. To be naked is to violate social norms and regulations. That is why you are prone to be ashamed.
However, what is considered naked in one context may not be in another.
Bare ankles, for example, excited scandal in Victorian England. Today, bare tops are commonplace on a French Mediterranean beach.
When it comes to nudity, art doesn’t necessarily imitate life.
In his critique of European oil painting, art critic John Berger distinguishes between nudity—”being yourself” without clothes—and “nude,” an art form that transforms a woman’s naked body into a pleasing spectacle for men.
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Feminist critics such as Ruth Barcan have complicated Berger’s distinction between nudity and nudity, insisting that nudity is already shaped by idealized representations.
In “Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy,” Barcan shows how nudity is not a neutral state but is loaded with meaning and expectation. He describes the “sensation of nakedness” as “an increased perception of temperature and air movement, the loss of the familiar boundary between the body and the world, as well as the effects of the actual gaze of others” or “the internal 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 thickness of her fur, Lucy was not naked.
But just as a nude is a kind of dress, since her discovery, Lucy presents herself in ways that reflect historical assumptions about motherhood and the nuclear family. For example, Lucy is shown alone with a male companion or with a male companion and children. Her facial expressions are warm and content or protective, reflecting idealized notions of motherhood.
The modern quest to visualize our distant ancestors has been criticized as a kind of “erotic fantasy science,” in which scientists attempt to fill in the blanks of the past based on their own assumptions about women, men, and their relationships to each other.
In their 2021 paper “Visual Depictions of Our Evolutionary Past,” an interdisciplinary team of researchers tried a different approach. They detail their own reconstruction of the Lucy fossil, bringing into relief their methods, the relationship between art and science, and the decisions made to fill gaps in scientific knowledge.
Their process contrasts with other hominin reconstructions, which often lack strong empirical justification and perpetuate misogynistic and racial misconceptions about human evolution. Historically, illustrations of the stages of human evolution have tended to culminate in the white European male. And many reconstructions of female hominins exaggerate features pejoratively associated with black women.
One of the co-authors of “Visual Depictions,” sculptor Gabriel Vinas, offers a visual clarification of Lucy’s reconstruction in “Santa Lucia,” a marble sculpture of Lucy as a nude figure draped in translucent fabric, representing the artist’s own insecurities and Lucy’s mysterious appearance.
Veiled Lucy talks about the complex relationships between nudity, veiling, sex and shame. But it also casts Lucy as a veiled virgin, a figure worshiped for sexual “purity.”
And yet I can’t help but imagine a Lucy behind the fabric, a Lucy who is neither in the sky with diamonds nor frozen in maternal idealization—a Lucy who “apeshits” through the veils draped over her, a Lucy who might be forced to wear a mask ​​Guerrilla Girls, if anything.