Don Johanson
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USAOver the course of his illustrious career Dr Johanson has produced some of paleoanthropology´s groundbreaking discoveries, including the most widely known and thoroughly studied fossil find of the 20th century – the Lucy skeleton.
Darwin postulated that not only was the human species a product of the evolutionary process, but deep in the prehistoric past, we actually shared a common ancestor with the African apes. Although the 20th century has been peppered with important fossil hominid finds from both eastern and southern Africa, it was Dr Johanson´s 1974 discovery of a 3.2-million-year-old hominid fossil in Ethiopia that added a crucial link. Lucy, as the skeleton was called, prompted on-going debate and major revisions in our knowledge and understanding of the human evolutionary past. The skeleton possessed an intriguing mixture of ape-like features such as a projecting face and small brain, but also characters we consider human such as upright walking. Lucy continues to be a diadem in the crown of hominid fossils and serves as an important touchstone for all subsequent discoveries.
In the 34 years since Johanson earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he has led field explorations in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the Middle East, and effectively reached across multiple media platforms – hosting and narrating the Emmy nominated PBS/NOVA series In Search of Human Origins, co-authoring nine books, and lecturing at universities, corporations, and public forums – to share his findings and stimulate healthy debate. Driven by a notion that we cannot fully grasp who we are and where we are headed as a species until we have a more complete knowledge of our evolutionary roots, Johanson founded the Institute of Human Origins, a human-evolution think tank. He is an honorary board member of the Explorers Club, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a distinguished member of the Siena Academy of Sciences in Italy. He also serves as the Virginia M. Ullman Chair in Human Origins at Arizona State University, where he teaches.
“Understanding who we are is not just a matter of idle curiosity. It is a matter of survival for our own species as well as for the millions of other species with whom we share the Earth."
--- Donald Johanson
Find out more:
www.becominghuman.org
ABSTRACTDarwin and the quest for human origins
When Darwin stunned the world with his 1859 publication, On the Origin of Species, he remained virtually silent on the notion that humans, like all other life, had evolved. His reticence to discuss human evolution may have, in large part, been due to the strong objections he knew would arise from those who read his book. For many people it was fine that animals and plants evolved, but not humans. Following the great success of The Origin, one of Darwin´s closest colleagues, Thomas Henry Huxley, in 1863, published Evidence as to Man´s Place in Nature. This series of public lectures drew attention to the many anatomical similarities between humans and the African apes, particularly the chimpanzee. This drove Huxley to propose that a common, ape-like, ancestor gave rise to humans and the African apes. In 1871 in his Descent of ManDarwinelaborated on Huxley´s suggestion that the common ancestor to African apes and humans lived anciently in Africa. This was a bold suggestion since the only known human fossils, Neanderthals, had been found in Europe. An African origin for humans met strong opposition from scholars who embraced a Eurocentric view for human origins.Huxley´s and Darwin´s prescient view that Africa would ultimately prove to be the cradle of humankind received initial support in 1924 with the discovery of a child´s skull from South Africa. The Taung baby, dubbed Australopithecus africanus, launched a fervent search for additional fossils focused in South Africa. In 1959 the stunning discovery of a 1.8 million-year-old hominid fossil from Olduvai Gorge, a cranium assigned to Australopithecus boisei, dramatically shifted focus to Africa´s Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa. Today, fifty years after the Olduvai find, the tree of human evolution has sprouted many branches and is fossil-rich with a diverse set of hominid species, all of which went extinct except for modern humans. While the exact geometry of the family tree is widely debated, we now have a good outline of roughly the last 6 million years of human evolution.
If Darwin and Huxley were alive today they would be deeply gratified not only because of the ever-increasing storehouse of fossil hominid discoveries, but because the African fossil record is a testament to their predictions. Furthermore, we now have sufficient fossil and archaeological evidence to substantiate the view that all major adaptations associated with being human make their earliest appearance in Africa. This is the continent where our ancestors first became bipedal, first made stone tools, first reduced canine size, first grew big brains, first included meat in their diets, first developed bodies of modern proportion, first developed division of labor, and first became Homo sapiens.
It is now beyond doubt that Africais indeed the cradle of humankind.
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