“Lucy,” the celebrated skeletal remains of a female hominid who lived 3.2 million years ago will leave Ethiopia next year for her first-ever foreign exhibition, officials said.

Beginning in September 2007, Lucy will enjoy top billing among 200 other Ethiopian exhibits that will tour museums in 10 US cities for four years, they said Wednesday.

“Lucy has been in Ethiopia over the last 30 years,” said Gezahgen Kebede, Ethiopia’s honorary consul in Houston in the US state of Texas, where the exhibition begins at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences.

“It is time for us to share her with the whole world because she is the origin of mankind,” he told AFP.

The trip will be Lucy’s first overseas visit for exhibition purposes since she was discovered by American paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 in Ethiopia’s northern Afar region.

Named after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” she was taken once to the United States for lab tests but has remained in the country since, stored in a special vault with a replica on display at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.

Gezahgen said he hoped the traveling exhibit would help alter the image of the Horn of Africa nation, which is perhaps better known to the outside world for famine, floods and other human suffering than science.

“The idea is to promote Ethiopia in a positive way,” he said. “We have a lot of attractions but it is not well known abroad, where images of drought and poverty are still dominant.”

Lucy, part of a hotly disputed branch of the human tree known as Australopithecus afarensis, was for more than 20 years, the earliest known member of the hominid family.

Hominids are primates who split from apes between five and seven million years ago and are considered the forerunners of anatomically modern humans, who appeared on the scene about 200,0000 years ago.

Once thought by some to be our ancestor, A. afarensis is now widely considered to be a failed branch of the human tree, for many experts suspect the hominid was anatomically far closer to apes than humans.