I love Lucy

Not only is Ethiopia the birthplace of coffee and the reputed resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, it is also the cradle of mankind, and home to the world's most famous ancestor, Lucy. Her name comes from the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' which was playing in the paleontologists' camp when she was discovered in 1974.

Lucy is a partial skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis female, estimated to have lived around 3.2 million years ago. She has just been on a tour of the USA, returning to Addis in May this year.

This picture is not of Lucy, but of one of the oldest known fossils of a modern human - Homo sapiens idaltu, about 200,000 years old.