Ohio - Day 7 - Lucy

Geneva State Park, Geneva
Tuesday, 7 May 2019

today's route

My main goal for the day, aside from changing campgrounds, was to visit the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, home of Lucy.

Of course, the first thing I did was get lost trying to get into Cleveland.  Ohio doesn't do nearly as good a job of labeling their highways as West Virginia does, and the online directions I got told me to "keep right at the fork" instead of saying "take exit 26."  Since when has an exit been a fork?  So I ended up on the wrong interstate, in the middle of a construction zone, with no way to turn around for miles.  And when I did get turned around, the highway signs once again neglected to say if I took this road I'd get back to the highway I wanted, so once again I went miles out of my way.

I finally got into Lee Heights, which looked like it had seen better days, and then into Shaker Heights (boyhood home of Paul Newman), a town that has never had a bad day - it's a beautiful area with beautiful homes - and then into Cleveland.

My destination is in a little cluster with the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Cleveland Botanical Garden.

an entrance to the Cleveland Botanical Garden

I got really lucky and found quite a few empty parking spaces on the street with meters that took actual coins.  There's a parking garage, but it had a maximum height of 8' or something low.  There were multiple school buses also parked on the street, and 2 others surrounded me after I'd parked.

In the center of this cluster of museums is a large green space and I took the dogs for a walk.  Unfortunately, a group of elementary-age kids came screaming - I mean, using outdoor voices - out of the Botanical Garden, and that scared Gracie into absolutely insisting we go back to the RV.

I managed to take this photo of Dexter first.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I'd found a Banfield that squeezed us in after lunch to take a look at Dexter's toe.  It's the same toe he fractured a few weeks ago, and when I noticed him licking it yesterday morning I took another look and realized he was missing part of his claw.  I have no idea when or how it happened, but that's the result.

So the vet took a look, squeezed some antibiotic ointment on it and bandaged it up pretty thoroughly.  Dext spent the first 5 minutes trying to kick the bandage off, and then he discovered he could walk on it and seemed to forget all about it.  But it kept catching my eye, like he was wearing a little sock.

Then I dumped the dogs and went to pay my $14 admission fee at the natural history museum.  I really wanted to see Lucy.

This is Lucy.  In 1974 scientists discovered several hundred fossilized bones - about 40% of her skeleton.  The brown ones in the skeleton here are casts of those originally found; the white ones are what was probably there that they didn't find.  Her bones are now at the National Museum in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

When she was found, she was the earliest known human ancester, as well as the most complete and best-preserved skeleton.

She stunned the scientific community by clearly being a "committed biped" but also clearly having a small brain - until her, they'd been convinced the brain development preceded the upright walking.  But you know how often women upset people's preconceived ideas.

The graphic on the left shows where in Ethiopia she was found.  The text on the right explains how scientists decide if they've found an upright walker.

Lucy turns out to have been unusual in being so short - she was an adult but only 3½' tall; they've since found others of her species and they were all around 5' to 5½' tall.


Lucy lived about 3.2 million years ago and was named for the Beatles: when the scientists celebrated that night in camp they played "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and Lucy was named for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."  Incredible the influence the Beatles had on our culture.

Her discovery made such a splash even I remember hearing about it - and I was living in Alaska by then and hearing about almost nothing.  These are photos of Dr. Johansen, Lucy's discoverer, talking with Jane Pauley and Gene Shalit in 1979, with John Chancellor announcing her discovery.

You can see one photo shows different kinds of skulls, and the museum has a display about that.  It shows part of the process scientists go through when trying to decide where on our family tree a new skeleton belongs.

From left to right we have skulls of a gorilla, a human, Lucy, and a chimpanzee.  Scientists now believe we split from the ancestor we share with chimpanzees about 7 million years ago.  When Dr. Johansen got back to the US with his newly discovered bones, he came to Cleveland to try to figure out where she belonged.  It was then that they learned she was one of us.

Lucy is only one exhibit in the museum, but I didn't take the time to look at anything else - I spent nearly an hour with her and needed to get back to the RV.

I did stop in the entrance hall to look at their pendulum, which they say is unique.

The knocked-over dominos show that the earth is rotating underneath the pendulum.

explaining Foucault's Pendulum

The information at the left explains why the museum's pendulum is unique.  I saw another one yesterday at the McKinley Museum, but that one was kept in motion by a motor.  The one here uses an electromagnet.

From the museum I managed to get out of Cleveland without getting lost and went east to Geneva, less than 50 miles from Erie, PA, and almost that far from Cleveland.