Love, Water, Memory by MEG DONOHUE

"Lucie settled back to read the story about her namesake--a pile of bones that lived over three million years before in Ethiopia. Something fluttered inside her as she read. She remembered this story. She remembered that the small ape-like human had been called "'The mother of Man," had been the first ape discovered that walked on two feet, and that in those days, the 1970's, a surprising number of people had been upset to think they might have been descented from an African, much less an ape."news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091001-oldest-human-skeleton