What the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy fossil reveals about nudity and shame

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What the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy fossil reveals about nudity and shame

Australopithecus afarensis Naturhistorisches Museum Wenen. Credit: Wikimedia Commons,

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Fifty years ago, scientists discovered a nearly complete fossilized skull and hundreds of pieces of bone of a 3.2-million-year-old female specimen of the genus Australopithecus afarensis, often described as “

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.” During a celebration following her discovery, she was named “Lucy,” after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Though Lucy has solved some evolutionary riddles, her appearance ******** an ancestral secret.

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dress her in thick, reddish-brown fur, with her face, hands, feet and breasts peeking out of denser thickets.

This hairy picture of Lucy, it turns out, might be wrong.

Technological advancements in genetic analysis suggest that Lucy may have been ******, or at least much more thinly veiled.

According to the coevolutionary tale of

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, our immediate ancestors

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and did not don clothing until

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.

That means that for over 2.5 million years, early humans and their ancestors were simply ******.

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, I’m interested in how modern culture influences representations of the past. And the way Lucy has been depicted in newspapers, textbooks and museums may reveal more about us than it says about her.

From nudity to shame

The

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was likely influenced by a combination of factors, including thermoregulation, delayed physiological development, attracting ******* partners and warding off parasites. Environmental, social and cultural factors may have encouraged the

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.

Both areas of research—of when and why hominins shed their body hair and when and why they eventually got dressed—emphasize the sheer size of the brain, which takes years to nurture and requires

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relative to other parts of the body.

Because human ******* require a long ******* of care before they can survive on their own, evolutionary interdisciplinary researchers have theorized that early humans adopted

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—a man and a woman partnering after forming a strong affinity for one another. By working together, the two can more easily manage years of parental care.

Pair bonding, however, comes with risks.

Because humans are social and live in large groups, they are bound to be tempted to break the pact of monogamy, which would make it ******* to raise children.

Some mechanism was needed to secure the social-******* pact. That mechanism was likely shame.

In the documentary “

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” evolutionary anthropologist

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explains the evolution of shame: “The human body is a supreme ******* advertisement… Nudity is a threat to the basic social contract, because it is an invitation to defection… Shame encourages us to stay faithful to our partners and share the responsibility of bringing up our children.”

Boundaries between body and world

Humans, aptly described as “

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,” are unique for their lack of fur and systematic adoption of clothing. Only by banning nudity did “nakedness” become a reality.

As human civilization developed, measures must have been put in place to enforce the social contract—punitive penalties, laws, social dictates—

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.

That’s how shame’s relationship to human nudity was born. To be ****** is to break social norms and regulations. Therefore, you’re prone to feeling ashamed.

What counts as ****** in one context, however, may not in another.

Bare ankles in Victorian England, for example,

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. Today, bare tops on a French Mediterranean beach

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.

When it comes to nudity, art doesn’t necessarily imitate life.

In his critique of the ********* oil painting tradition, art critic

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distinguishes between nakedness—”being oneself” without clothes—and “the *****,” an art form that transforms the ****** body of a woman into a pleasurable spectacle for men.

Feminist critics such as

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complicated Berger’s distinction between nakedness and the *****, insisting that nakedness is already shaped by idealized representations.

In “

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,” Barcan demonstrates how nakedness is not a neutral state but is laden with meaning and expectations. She describes “feeling ******” as “the heightened perception of temperature and air movement, the loss of the familiar boundary between body and world, as well as the effects of the actual gaze of others” or “the internalized gaze of an imagined other.”

Nakedness can elicit a spectrum of feelings—from eroticism and intimacy to vulnerability, ***** and shame. But there is no such thing as nakedness outside of social norms and cultural practices.

Lucy’s veils

Regardless of her fur’s density, then, Lucy was not ******.

But just as the ***** is a kind of dress, Lucy, since her discovery, has been presented in ways that reflect historical assumptions about motherhood and the nuclear family. For example, Lucy is depicted

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or with a

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. Her facial expressions are

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or

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, reflecting idealized images of motherhood.

The modern quest to visualize our distant ancestors has been critiqued as a sort of “

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,” in which scientists attempt to fill in the blanks of the past based on their own assumptions about women, men and their relationships to one another.

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“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 decisions made to supplement gaps in scientific knowledge.

Their process is contrasted with other hominin reconstructions, which often lack strong empirical justifications and perpetuate misogynistic and racialized misconceptions about human evolution. Historically, illustrations of the

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have tended to culminate in a white ********* male. And many

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exaggerate features offensively associated with ****** women.

One of the co-authors of “Visual Depictions,” sculptor

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, offers a visual elucidation of Lucy’s reconstruction in “

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“—a marble sculpture of Lucy as a ***** figure draped in translucent cloth, representing the artist’s own uncertainties and Lucy’s mysterious appearance.

The veiled Lucy speaks to the complex relationships among nudity, covering, **** and shame. But it also casts Lucy as a veiled *******, a figure revered for ******* “purity.”

And yet I can’t help but imagine Lucy beyond the cloth, a Lucy neither in the sky with diamonds nor frozen in maternal idealization—a Lucy going “

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” over the veils thrown over her, a Lucy who might find herself compelled to wear a

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, if anything at all.

Provided by
The Conversation

This article is republished from

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under a Creative Commons license. Read the

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Citation:
What the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy fossil reveals about nudity and shame (2024, June 24)
retrieved 24 June 2024
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