By Yibeltal Temeche. The fossilised remains of Lucy. Courtesy of Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University. The discovery and the public response In 1974, a remarkable discovery in Ethiopia changed how we understand human origins. A 3.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton—popularly known as “Lucy”—was unearthed in Hadar. Scientifically, Lucy belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis, an extinct early hominin that lived millions of years before modern humans. Her discovery provided some of the earliest clear evidence of upright walking, a defining trait in human evolution. However, in the decades since her discovery, a fascinating divergence has emerged: while the scientific community classifies Lucy as an extinct early hominin, the Ethiopian public narrative has embraced her as a national matriarch—the "first human" and the "mother of humanity". The gap between science and public perception From a scientific perspective, Lucy was not a human in the...
By Hannah Little. We interviewed science communicators, asking whether they use storytelling strategies that are known to cause humans to pay attention to some stories more than others, and why they might avoid using certain strategies. Science communicators expressed concerns about using communication tactics that might contradict the objectives of science communication, threaten the integrity of science and risk the welfare of audiences. Humans have used stories to understand the world around us for millennia, from folktales to news stories, and from movies to the gossip we collect in the local pub. Science communicators have long been trying to capitalise on this most human instinct to pass on the information we hear in the form of stories. For science communication, stories enable us to foreground relevance, emotion and engagement, which can be used to persuade audiences or make information stick with people. Not all stories are created equal; some are more memorable than others. O...