Lucy fell out of a tree!

It’s been ages since I’ve seen Dawn. Which is a shame. We decided to rectify it and hunted around for a folk singer or something entertaining to go and see. Sadly there seems to be very little on at the moment in our neck of the woods.

We then tried to arrange a day for lunch. This proved almost impossible – we could have managed it but it would have meant one or the other of us missing a day of something we didn’t want to miss – so I suggested dinner.

Rather than suffer the vegetarian options at a restaurant, I asked her if she’d like me to cook her some sea bass. She was very happy with this option and we chose tonight as the date.

And what a lovely night we had. Just chatting and catching up (not to mention showing off the window and the library) over a lovely bottle of Merlot she’d brought with her. She filled me in on how her PhD is going and the extraordinary collection of weirdos she attracts when she is in charge of the bones table at museum open days. (I’m not going to say too much about them except that Dawn can now vouch for the fact that Freya is smellier than the Farty Man.)

The evening being more than pleasant, we ate outside, the water feature (which I’d assiduously cleaned today) burbling away.

Possibly the most exciting part of the evening was our joy at discovering that Lucy (the Australopithecus afarensis we went all the way to Houston to see so many years ago) underwent a lot of CT scanning after we saw her. Dawn spotted the news story the other day and forwarded it to me. The results of the scanning pointed to Lucy falling out of a tree shortly before her death. Therefore, the researchers are positing that the fall was what may have killed her. The BBC story is here.

I may have moved away from archaeology but anything to do with early humans (and Lucy in particular) still sparks my interest.

So, a lovely night with news about an old, mutual friend. We parted saying we needed to do it more often. That works for me.