Donald Johanson

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Donald Johanson

Donald Carl Johanson (born June 28, 1943 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American paleoanthropologist . He became internationally known after finding the 20 percent preserved skeleton of a 3.18 million year old female Australopithecus afarensis on November 24, 1974 . The fossil was given the scientific name AL 288-1 ("AL" stands for " Afar Locality "), but is better known as " Lucy ".

Life

Don Johanson is the son of Swedish emigrants who settled in Chicago, where his father worked as a hairdresser. The father died when his son was two years old. His mother moved with him to Hartford , the capital of the US state Connecticut , where he grew up in poor conditions. At the age of eight he met a neighbor, Paul Leser, who taught anthropology at the Hartford Seminary Foundation - a theological seminary - and who was a cultural anthropologist doing regular research in Tanzania and Malawi . As a "surrogate father" he aroused Don's interest in anthropology and Africa. Nevertheless, Don Johanson studied from February 1962 to June 1967 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana: initially for two years in chemistry ; his neighbor and mentor had advised him to study something “practical” in the age of space travel, with which one could also earn money - physics, chemistry or biology, but by no means a 19th century subject like anthropology. But Don was so bored with studying chemistry that he finally switched to anthropology and in January 1966 also obtained a bachelor's degree.

Because of his good performance, he received a scholarship from the National Institutes of Dental Research from 1967 to 1971 for the University of Chicago , where the prominent paleoanthropologist Francis Clark Howell taught. In Chicago, Johanson obtained his master's degree in June 1970 with a thesis on Morphological and Metrical Variability in the Chimpanzee Molar Dentition and also dealt with the dentition of chimpanzees for his doctoral thesis . He scoured all European museums for chimpanzee teeth, which, according to his own statements, bored him terribly, but ultimately benefited his later work optimally, as the teeth of the fossils are usually the best preserved finds and humans are most closely related to the chimpanzees. For An Odontological Study of the Chimpanzee with Some Implications for Hominoid Evolution he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1974.

As early as 1972 he had a to 1976 exerted teaching ( Assistant Professor ) at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland held, the (1976 to 1978 an activity on the same site as an associate professor to professor Associate ) joined. He then worked from 1978 to 1981 both in Cleveland and at Kent State University in Kent (Ohio) as an adjunct professor . From 1983 to 1989 he was professor of anthropology at Stanford University .

From 1972 to 1997 Don Johanson also worked as a research associate and advisor for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History .

In 1981 Don Johanson founded the Institute of Human Origins . It has been affiliated with Arizona State University in Tempe since 1997, where he has been professor of anthropology since 1997. The interdisciplinary institute tries u. a. to infer the way of life and behavior of the hominids from the bone finds and other evidence .

He is the author of numerous popular science books and films on topics in the field of paleoanthropology. He is also co-organizer of the award-winning website “becominghuman.org”.

Scientific successes

Replica of Lucy's skeleton in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City

While Don Johanson was collecting the data for his doctoral thesis, he was invited by Clark Howell in 1970 to accompany him as a "dental expert" on a research trip to Ethiopia and South Africa. From 1970 to 1972 he therefore stayed several times for field studies in the Omo area in Ethiopia . In 1970, as a paleoanthropologist for the International Afar Research Expedition , he and a few colleagues went to the Ethiopian Afar Triangle for a short time to find out whether excavations there could be worthwhile and was surprised by the large number of animal fossils. Large areas of them were exposed because the soil previously above them had eroded over the centuries . It was therefore decided to organize an extensive expedition there the following year.

From 1973 to 1977 Johanson was director of the US research team for the International Afar Research Expedition . In 1973 he discovered the fossil AL 129-1 in the Afar triangle (more precisely: in Hadar on the Awash River ) , the first knee ever to be found by an early hominid . It proved that the individual had walked upright during its lifetime more than 3 million years ago, and later assigned it to the species Australopithecus afarensis .

In 1974, fossils were searched for again in Hadar, and the excavation campaign ended with a sensational success: On November 24, 1974, Johanson, who was accompanied by postdoc Tom Gray at site 162 , came across Lucy around noon . According to Johanson, the find got its name on the same evening, when people celebrated the discovery with exuberance and repeatedly played and sang along with an audio cassette with Beatles songs - including Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds . Who exactly came up with the idea of ​​using this name could not be determined later. However, it was immediately clear to the researchers that they had made an important find, since it is extremely rare to find leg, arm and torso fragments that belong together; How extraordinary the find was - that it represented a new species of hominid - was only revealed three years later on the basis of analyzes in the laboratory.

According to Yves Coppens , the first piece of bone found by Lucy on November 24th received no special attention, as dozens of similar finds had previously been made in the region. Only a subsequent, more detailed examination of the site showed that further bone fragments apparently came from the same, clearly female individual, that is, that a significant discovery had been made. It was only on this evening that the name Lucy came about.

1975 went down in paleoanthropology as the year Johanson and his group found the so-called first family - a flowery term for the discovery of fossil bones of several hominids in one place.

Finally, in 1976, more, albeit somewhat younger (2.5 million years old) remains of hominids were found, surprisingly together with stone tools, the oldest found to date. After that, no further excavations could be carried out in Ethiopia for 15 years due to the unstable political situation. Instead, Johanson conducted field research a. a. in Yemen and Egypt (1977), in Saudi Arabia (1978) and in Jordan (1984).

Since 1974 Johanson was curator of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and tried together with Tim White , a young colleague, to scientifically describe the many hominid fossils found. First Tim White, then Johanson finally came to the conclusion that they all belonged to the same species, that the smaller individuals represented the female and the larger the male. In honor of the Afar region , Johanson named it Australopithecus afarensis ; he first announced the name in 1978 at a symposium of the Nobel Foundation in Sweden.

The Y-shaped family tree, which was initially strictly rejected by Richard Leakey but is now widely accepted, goes back to Johanson, according to which Australopithecus afarensis led on the one hand to a developmental line to modern humans, on the other hand to the so-called robust Australopithecines (among others to Paranthropus robustus and Paranthropus boisei ).

From 1985 to 1988 Don Johanson received permission to dig for hominids in the succession of the Leakey Clan in Laetoli and in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania . Since 1990, excavations can be carried out again in Ethiopia, during which the remains of several hundred australopithecines have been found, male and female, small children and young people. For Don Johanson, these many finds in one place are an indication that Australopithecus also lived in groups.

Lucy is now in the National Museum of Ethiopia ; a detailed cast of the original is exhibited in the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt .

Donald Johanson, 2018

Honors

Don Johanson has been an honorary doctorate from John Carroll University ( Cleveland ) since 1979 and from the College of Wooster ( Wooster ) since 1985 . In 1982 he received the American Book Award in Science for his book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind . In 2015, an asteroid that the Lucy spacecraft is expected to pass in April 2025 was named after him: (52246) Donaldjohanson . In 2014 he received the Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation . Template: future / in 4 years

Fonts (selection)

  • Ethiopia yields first "family" of early man. In: National Geographic Magazine. Volume 150, No. 6, 1976, pp. 790-811.
  • with Blake Edgar: Lucy and her children. With photographs by David Brill, translated from English by Sebastian Vogel , 2nd updated and expanded edition. Elsevier Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-8274-1670-4 .
  • with C. Owen Lovejoy , AH Burstein and KG Heiple: Functional implications of the Afar knee joint. In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 44, No. 1, 1976, p. 188 (abstract).
  • with Tim White and Yves Coppens : A new Species of the Genus Australopithecus (Primates: Hominidae) from the Pliocene of Eastern Africa. In: Kirtlandia. No. 28, 1978.
  • with Tim White: On the status of Australopithecus afarensis. In: Science . Volume 207, No. 4435, 1980, pp. 1102-1103, doi: 10.1126 / science.207.4435.1102 .
  • as co-author: Lucy and her children. Spektrum Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-8274-1049-5 .
  • with Maitland A. Edey: Lucy. The beginnings of mankind. Piper, 1994, ISBN 3-492-11555-1 .
  • with James Shreeve: Lucy's child. In search of the first people. Piper, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-492-03390-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Donald Johanson Maitland A. Edey, Lucy. The beginnings of mankind , p. 85 ff.
  2. ^ Public lecture by Yves Coppens on November 15, 2006 in the Senckenberg Museum , Frankfurt am Main
  3. ^ Donald C. Johanson - Freedom From Religion Foundation . In: fff.org .
personal data
SURNAME Johanson, Donald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Johanson, Donald Carl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleoanthropologist, discoverer of Lucy
DATE OF BIRTH June 28, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago