WADE STEPHENS, The Tampa Tribune

For 30 days in January, Wade Stephens III and his 20-year-old daughter, Annie, traveled in North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They shared writing, audio and photography duties as they absorbed the culture conflicts in Egypt, Tunisia, the Sinai, Ethiopia and unfolding events in Gaza, Kenya and Somalia. Annie Stephens also did an independent study project for her college’s international studies curriculum.

ADDIS ABABA – The Great Rift Valley stands out from space. It’s a 3,100-mile gap that runs from Syria in Asia Minor to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It’s 8 million years old, but the American trekkers are on their way to a small dark green basement room that is home to fossils dug from the Horn of Africa.

The old-man father and college-student daughter were going to see an exhibit of real fossils in the state museum of natural history in the capital of Ethiopia, and to track down “Lucy,” whose 1974 discovery revolutionized theories of early man

There is a question where the real Lucy is. Is she in residence in Ethiopia, or off at Houston’s Museum of Natural Science on a controversial six-year tour of America? It depends on who is believed, but it’s certain that her name came from a Beatles song that was playing at the time of her discovery in 1974.

This much is known about Lucy these days: Without public announcement and under the cover of darkness in August 2007, the 3.3 million-year-old fossil, or her replica, was shipped to America to earn money for the Ethiopian government. It will be exhibited publicly in America, but in Ethiopia it is kept in a vault and Ethiopians view a replica.

Lucy’s so-called child, Dikika (da-KEE-ka) Baby, is in Germany with Zeresenay Alemseged, the Ethiopian paleoanthropologist who painstakingly nudged her out of the hard sandstone of a hillside in Ethiopia’s Dikika Valley in 2000. The site above the Awash River is one of the most remote on Earth, full of lions, warring tribes, malaria, flash floods, high heat, invaders from neighboring countries and hyenas. At the Horn of Africa are the counties of Ethiopia, Chad and Kenya, which most likely are the birthplaces of Man.

The nearly intact Dikika fossil followed by 30 years the discovery of the adult Lucy in a hill six miles away, connecting the “baby” to Lucy. But the baby actually lived 100,000 years before Lucy. The 3-year-old juvenile most likely was buried by a flood in a pile of protective pebbles and sand that time turned into rock.

Addis Ababa attorney Kine Arega (CQ) told The Associated Press that “she is a national treasure. “How come the public has no inkling about this?” said Zelahem Assefa, an Ethiopian who works at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “Money cannot be a justification to export original specimens.”

Citing ethical problems and a conviction that Lucy’s fragile remains should not travel, The Smithsonian refused an exhibition. Richard Leakey, a renowned fossil scientist, said “It’s a form of prostitution … it’s a gross exploitation of the ancestors of humanity.”

The real Lucy remains in its vault here, the consensus goes in Addis Ababa, and a replica was sent to America. The final word rests with a tall thin museum guard in a green semi-uniform who said in the Amarigna language to the trekkers’ translator, “Who would be so stupid to take that risk?”

The Dikika fossil is remarkable for its implications of development of society. At some point, our human ancestors lost the opposable big toes of chimpanzees and other apes, which were used by a baby to grip its mother with all four limbs, allowing the mother to forage, travel and escape.

The biological loss of opposable toes is momentous. The mother would have had to limit her mobility because now she had to carry her baby. That meant she would have had to limit her ability to provide for herself. And that meant depending on others, and others depending on her.

That is a social bonding that leads to large social groups and monogamy. There were friends and mates along the Great Rift Valley before the hominins started the first migration out of Africa.

Dikika’s big toe is still locked in sandstone awaiting the excavation that will reveal its structure, and a significant evolutionary advance.

The student and old man tried to visit the site, but even the people who charter helicopters into the Afar declined to actually land in the Dikika Valley – a matter of being mistaken for a military craft of area combatants. Dikika and her relatives are safe in the rocks, and Lucy is in the sky with diamonds.

Wade Stephens III is a former Tribune editorial writer.