Popular renderings 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 naked, or at least much more thinly veiled.
I don’t know if I’m really on board with the idea that a pre-genus homo hominid who existed before the concept of clothing existed teaches something about modern human clothing and shame.
There is a discussion to be had about shame and nudity, but it’s silly to go to Lucy as an example when there are living human beings in that part of the world right now who don’t seem to have much shame when it comes to nudity. I would think they would be better to use as a lesson.
Well, I think it’s more about examining cultural biases in our scientific literature.
If that was what I was supposed to take from the story, they seriously buried the lede by putting that at the very end of the article.
Lucy is a good choice. How scientific renderings of a famous subject show off social shame bleeding into research is more approachable than doing the same thing with relatively obscure modern research subjects.
For the shame aspect you need look no further than religion. Shame is just another in a long line of social constructs designed to allow people who don’t produce anything of value to survive off the labor of those who do.
We started wearing clothes as we evolved to have less hair and expanded across the planet into more varied climates. It’s that simple.