Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations

by Arnold van de Laar

So the cause for varicose veins is that one small valve in the saphenous arch is too weak for the job it is supposed to do because, for some mysterious reason, there are no valves in the large veins above it. The obvious question is: why? The answer is staggeringly simple. To find it, we have to go back 3.2 million years, to Lucy, a twenty-five-year-old Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy and the other members of her species were among the first of our ancestors to walk on two legs. Lucy, by walking upright, is at the root of half of modern-day surgical practice. Parts of her skeleton were found in Ethiopia in 1974 by paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray. They called her after the Beatles’ song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, which was playing on the radio when they were digging. Lucy is currently to be seen in the national museum in Addis Ababa and replicas can be found in museums all around the world.