Lucy was listed as guest of honor at the Institute of Human Origins dinner Monday at New York's exclusive Metropolitan Club. Not the "I Love Lucy" Lucy but the "We all love Lucy" Lucy because she's the human race's mutual ancestor and, incidentally, the gal for whom the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" was titled.
She's Lucy the Fossil, dug up by anthropologists in Ethiopia in 1974. Dr. Donald C. Johanson, one of the scientists who did the digging, said the dinner celebrated the 20th anniversary of finding "the most complete ancestor we have.""At the beginning of 1994, we got Lucy to reveal her age accurately and she is 3.2 million years old, plus or minus 10,000 years."
Johanson said Lucy will be resting in a wooden storage box in Addis Abbaba, the Ethiopian capital, while she is being toasted in the Big Apple.