Donald Johanson

Early life and education

Johanson was born in Chicago, Illinois to Swedish parents, and is the nephew of wrestler Ivar Johansson. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1966, and his master's degree (1970) and PhD (1974) from the University of Chicago. At the time of the discovery of Lucy, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. In 1981, he established the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, California which he later moved to Arizona State University in 1997. Johanson holds an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Westfield State College in 2008.

"Lucy"

Lucy was discovered in Hadar, Ethiopia on November 24, 1974, when Johanson, coaxed away from his paperwork by graduate student Tom Gray for a spur-of-the-moment survey, caught the glint of a white fossilized bone out of the corner of his eye, and recognized it as hominin. Forty percent of the skeleton was eventually recovered, and was later described as the first known member of Australopithecus afarensis. Johanson was astonished to find so much of her skeleton all at once. Pamela Alderman, a member of the expedition, suggested she be named "Lucy" after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" which was played repeatedly during the night of the discovery.

A bipedal hominin, Lucy stood about three and a half feet tall; her bipedalism supported Raymond Dart's theory that australopithecines walked upright. Johanson and his team concluded from Lucy's rib that she ate a plant-based diet, and from her curved finger bones that she was probably still at home in trees. They did not immediately see Lucy as a separate species, but considered her an older member of Australopithecus africanus. The discovery, however, of several more skulls of similar morphology persuaded most palaeontologists to classify her as a species called afarensis.

Johanson and Maitland A. Edey won a 1982 U.S. National Book Award in Science for the first popular book about this work, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.

"First Family"

AL 333, commonly referred to as the "First Family," is a collection of prehistoric hominin teeth and bones of at least thirteen individuals that were also discovered in Hadar by Johanson's team in 1975. Generally thought to be members of the species Australopithecus afarensis, the fossils are estimated to be about 3.2 million years old.

Awards

In 1991, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP) awarded Johanson their highest honor, the In Praise of Reason award. Johanson accepted the "Emperor Has No Clothes" award at the Freedom From Religion Foundation 37th annual convention on October 24, 2014.