A conversation with the paleoanthropologist and founding director of the Institute of Human Origins.

Donald Johanson: rnSure.  I’m Don Johanson,rnfounding director of the Institute of Human Origins.

Question: How do scientists locate and recover fossils?

Donald Johanson: rnWell I think when someone sees a brand-new discovery, for example in thernpages of a National Geographic magazine or whatever, they think you just kindrnof travel out there and look around and run into one of these bones and it’srnalmost by luck that one finds these things, but we apply a pretty strategicrnplan to surveying and completely scouring an area.  We will map out an area on aerial photographs andrnsystematically work through the various grid system that we set up, spend threernor four days in an area the size of a New York City block for example withrnmaybe five or six people and the only way to find a fossil is to look and lookrnand look and look and hope that the light is right, that you’re concentratingrnon a particular spot and once you find something you then kneel down, have arnclose look at it.  Before you evenrnpick it up make a photograph, map it exactly.  Now of course we can use GPS units and in the case of arnfossil that has been broken, you try to keep people out of the area, so thatrnthere is no damage done to any of the bone fragments and you set up a micro-grid system, so that you map every piece and number it as you pick it up andrnphotograph it and bag it and bring it back to the research camp where wernidentify it, catalog it and actually photograph it in more detail. 

Question: In what ways is new technology making the searchrnfor fossils easier?

Donald Johanson: rnWell there is nothing really that helps us search for fossils.  We can use satellite imagery torneliminate areas that are where there are volcanic rocks for example.  Fossils are best preserved inrnsedimentary rocks like sands and silts and things like that and they leave arnparticular signature in these aerial photographs, so we know where not to gornand we know where we might have a possibility.  So that finding fossils themselves still involves all of thernground survey, going out, making preliminary surveys in a vehicle, finding arnplace that has fossils then concentrating on that area and searching day in andrnday out and then ultimately determining whether or not we should anyrnexcavations.  Sometimes we actuallyrndo excavation.  In the case of thernLucy skeleton that I found in ’74, most of her was exposed on the surface.  She had been eroded out by thernrainstorms in the area, but other places we’ve had to do significantrnexcavation.

Question: What was the scientific significance of the “Lucy”rnfind?

Donald Johanson: rnWell I think Lucy’s position on the human family tree is what is mostrnimportant.  We proposed way back inrn1981 in an article in Science that Lucy was the last common ancestor, herrnspecies, the tongue twister, Australopithecus afarensis, named after the Afarrnregion where she was discovered. rnThat she was the last common ancestor to branches that led to us as wellrnas branches that went extinct and today that position has been solidified byrnthe fact that we found nearly 400 specimens of her species, that she is thatrnimportant bridge between much more ancient and more ape like looking ancestorsrnand more specialized or derived species like other species of Australopithecusrnand also our own genus homo.  Sornher position on the family tree has been solidified and that is probably thernsingle most important thing about her, that she gives us a real glimpse asrnthese 400 specimens do of what that species looked like at about between threernand four million years ago.

Question: What would “Lucy,” and others of her species, havernbeen like in person? 

Donald Johanson: rnWell Lucy herself, if we were… I stopped to pick up a cup of coffee outrnfront, you know, I was looking down the street.  Now if we saw her walking down the street, as opposed to thernaverage New Yorker she would have been very short, about three and a half feetrntall.  She, I would suspect,rnalthough we have no definitive proof of this, but because of her antiquity andrnbecause of the fact that she probably lived a lifestyle much more like presentrnday chimpanzees, was probably fairly hairy.  She had a very projecting face, a very ape like face, ratherrnsloping forehead and a very small skull. rnHer brain would have been about the size of an average grapefruit forrnexample.  A modern human’s skull isrnabout 1,400 cubic centimeters.  Herrnbrain was less than 400 cubic centimeters.  She would have been walking upright.  One thing we would have noticed rightrnaway is that she had relatively long arms.  Her arms would have come down almost to her knees, so that’srnkind of evolutionary baggage which is leftover from the time that her ancestorsrnwere living in the trees.  Probablyrnlived in a group, I don’t think she was living as a solitary individual, livingrnmost of the daylight hours I imagine on the ground, although it’s notrnimpossible that she and other members of her species would make nests in therntrees at night.  At three and arnhalf feet in stature it’s much safer to be sleeping up in the trees than on thernground.  If she had a male memberrnof her species with her the male would have been more like five feet tall.  Lucy would have weighed maybe 60rnpounds.  A male would have weighedrnup to 100 pounds.  Maybe theirrnlarge size had something to do with their protection of the troop that Lucy andrnher other members of her species were living in.  They lived in more forest environments and that isrninteresting because our traditional view when we look at televisionrndocumentaries on human evolution we see the earliest human ancestors walkingrnout on the grasslands and we get the idea that that’s where they first becamernupright.  That’s where they firstrnevolved, but now since 1974, ’75 collecting the fossil animals that are foundrnwith Lucy, the kinds of antelopes for example, the kinds of pigs, looking atrnfossil pollen we know that it was much more forested and that these earlyrnupright walking ancestors lived in a more forested environment, much like thernancestors who are living in a forest. rnThey were undoubtedly essentially vegetarians, relying to a large degreernon probably fruit, but I would also suspect that from time to time they usedrntwigs and blades of grass like chimpanzees do to extract termites.  They would have eaten smallrnvertebrates.  They would have eatenrnbird’s eggs and in the case of Lucy in the same layer, the same strata where wernfound her we found fossilized crocodile and turtle eggs.  Maybe she had been watching a crocodilernlay eggs or a turtle and gone down to the edge of the lake where she died andrnwas digging those up and was perhaps taken, you know unawares by a crocodiles.  But basically they were vegetariansrnliving in groups in much more forested areas.

Question: Is it true that “Lucy” was named after “Lucy inrnthe Sky With Diamonds”?

Donald Johanson: rnThe origins of Lucy’s name. rnI had a girlfriend on the expedition whose name was Pamela, and we wererncelebrating the discovery.  Ofrncourse this was a major discovery. rnHere is 40% of a skeleton, 3.2 million years old.  It was pretty mind-blowing, and I hadrnbeen, always had been a great Beatles fan, so we had Beatles tapes playing on arnlittle Sony tape recorder, and the “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” albumrnwas playing and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was playing and Pamela said,rn“Well if you think that this specimen is a female why don’t you name herrnLucy?”  And I thought wow, well yournknow, I’m a scientist.  It shouldrnhave a scientific name.  I just gotrnmy PhD at the University of Chicago. rnWe shouldn’t give cute little names to these fossils.  Yet, it was too late.  Once that word was uttered the nextrnmorning at breakfast students said, “Are we going back to the Lucy site?”  “Do you think we’ll find more of Lucy’srnskull?”  “How old do you think Lucyrnwas when she died?”  And all of arnsudden she started to become a personality.  She was identifiable as an individual.  She was not just Afar Locality 288,rnwhich is the entry in our log book. rnThat’s her catalog number. rnShe became a person and a personality, and what is interesting about thatrnis I think if we sat around the table and said, “Well what should we name thisrnspecimen?”  “Should we give it arnname?” it never would have worked,rnso it was just pure serendipity, the name stuck.

Question: What is the scientific legacy of the “FirstrnFamily” discovery? 

Donald Johanson: rnIt’s interesting that you bring up the question of the First Familyrnbecause First Family was found in 1975 and it’s my belief that if we had foundrnthose fossils first they might have become even more famous than the Lucyrnskeleton.  Lucy is sort of thernbenchmark by which people judge the field of paleoanthropology and the study ofrnhuman origins.  It’s like when yournpick up the “New York Times” and on the front John Noble Wilford has got anrnarticle about a new fossil and you’re at dinner and someone says, “Well I don’trnknow very much about that.”  “Andrnyou say well you know it’s older than Lucy.”  And they go, “Oh, older than Lucy.”  You know it’s a reference point, butrnthe First Family site, which was found the following year by a medical doctorrnwho was on the expedition.  He wasrnout surveying, walking, spotted a block of rock with a couple of teeth in itrnand here we have the remains of somewhere between 13 and 17 individuals fromrnone geological horizon.  A littlernbit older than Lucy, maybe you know tens of thousands of years older, but theyrnweren’t complete fossils.  Theyrnweren’t complete individuals I should say, but they were adults.  They were infants.  They were males and females.  This was a group of afarensis, a grouprnof Lucy’s species that had been living together.  There were two infants that looked like they could almost berntwins when you look at the teeth for example.  There were large males and there were small adults.  The small adults were females.  So what was important about the FirstrnFamily is it gave us an idea of biological variation.  If we look at people today for example, just walk a cityrnblock in New York, you see there is a variation in stature.  There is a variation inrnphysiognomy.  There is a variationrnin if you could look into their mouths and into the shape of teeth and sornon.  Well here was a population andrnnothing like that has ever been found before or ever found since.  This is a unique snapshot.  This is a moment when a group ofrncreatures at about 3.2 million years ago, a little bit older than Lucy sufferedrnsome extraordinary catastrophic event. rnWe don’t know what that was. rnWe thought it was a flash flood, but the geology isn’t right forrnthat.  We don’t know why they allrndied, but it’s a mass death and it allows us to solidify the hypothesis thatrnLucy’s species was typified by having large males and small females.  They’re not two different species.  They’re just variations on a species,rnlarge one males, small ones females. rnThis is a discovery that I think today in 2010 really deservesrnrevisiting and going back and doing a detailed analysis of the specimens.  It is a unique snapshot.  It is one of the things that is for usrnbiologically more important than the discovery of a single skeleton forrnexample.

Question: If the discovery were to be revisited, whatrnquestions could it answer?

Donald Johanson: rnWell I think there are a number of questions.  One of them would be to see if there is any detailed workrnthat can be done on surface damage that might tell us something about how longrnthey were out on the surface after they died, perhaps how they died.  So far we have not seen carnivore damagernon it, so we don’t see the typical hyena chewing that you see on some of these,rnbut is there anything on the surfaces of the bone that might help us understandrnhow those bones came to be where we found them?  The other thing I think that would be interesting is to usernnew technology that is available in the scanning area where you can use micrornscans and scan these bones almost micron by micron that would give us somernideas about growth rate and this would be particularly true of the teeth.  There is a three-quarters of a babyrnskull that is distorted and broken. rnThat really needs to be reconstructed to give us an idea of what wernthink a three year-old really looked like.  There has been a discovery at another site very close tornwhere Lucy was found of a nearly complete baby skull by my colleague at thernCalifornia Academy of Sciences, an extraordinary Ethiopian skull, a wonderfulrnman by the name of Zeresenay Alemseged, who has found a 3.3 million year-oldrnbaby, so I think there are going to be a lot of things that would come out ofrnthis, and it’s almost a project in itself.

Question: When and where did the first recognizably modernrnhumans appear?

Donald Johanson: rnYeah, that’s a…  Thernappearance of modern, or of homo sapiens, of someone you wouldn’t feel toornuncomfortable sitting next to at, say, Lincoln Center, surprising answerrnprobably.  Going back to probablyrnabout 200,000 years now there were fossils found in the late 1960s in SouthernrnEthiopia in a place called the Kibish or in the Omo region, and those fossilsrnhave been preserved in the Ethiopian National Museum ever since their discoveryrnand we thought they were maybe at the most 90,000 years old.  A research team has gone back and datedrna geological horizon at the site and they are close to 200,000 years old andrnthey have skulls like yours and mine, so they would have appeared with musclesrnand flesh and so on very much like we do, so these would justifiably be putrninto our own species, homo sapiens, supposedly wise man and…  I know I question that too every time Irnwatch the evening news, but it means that the earliest members of our speciesrnappeared in Africa.  There are alsornfossils from Southern Africa that suggest 100 to 150,000 years and we’re beginningrnto find evidence in South Africa of things like the use of ochre, thernmanufacture of bone and bone tools, the manufacture of blade tools and variousrntechnologies that don’t show up in Europe until 40,000 years old.  Yet, in South Africa there as much asrn160,000 years, so homo sapiens can certainly be traced back to at least 160,000rnand I would say to somewhere around 200,000 years ago.

Question: What happened to the Neanderthals, and was it ourrnfault?

Donald Johanson: rnWell I don’t think we interbred with the Neanderthals at all.  There are some people who think thatrnthere was some level of interbreeding. rnI think that we look so biologically different that we looked and wernacted so different and we culturally were so different that we would not have hadrninterbreeding between two species. rnI call them Neanderthal homos and Neanderthalensis and modern humans,rnhomo sapiens.  Neanderthals evolvedrnin Europe as an isolated group. rnThat is one of the conditions for the development of a new species, thatrnthey’re isolated genetically by a geographical barrier or whatever from otherrnpopulations, and they evolved and adapted to glacial Europe.  They lived there for a few hundredrnthousand years.  We left Africa 40rnto 50,000 years ago with a very sophisticated technology, with an incrediblyrncreative mind, with division of labor, with a whole series of things that werernvery different from Neanderthals, and when we began to compete withrnNeanderthals for game and for territory Neanderthals fled and the latestrnsurviving Neanderthals we have are found in Gibraltar at about 28,000 yearsrnago.  So I think that as we movedrninto Europe from the Middle East Neanderthals moved westward, ultimately downrninto the Iberian Peninsula where they hung on until about 28,000 years ago andrnultimately went extinct.

Question: At what point in the evolutionary timeline didrnhumans develop creativity?

Donald Johanson: rnYeah, well, everyone when asked that question or ponders that questionrnimmediately thinks of the beautiful caves in southwest France, the most famousrnof course being Lascaux, where you have beautiful polychrome paintings ofrnanimals on the walls and so on. rnThose are only 20,000 years old. rnThe work that my colleague at the Institute of Human Origins is doing,rnCurtis Marean, in sites on the very southern tip of Africa, he is findingrnpieces of ochre that are engraved. rnThere are no animal pictures them. rnThey’re simple geometric designs, small pieces maybe four or five inchesrnlong.  Ochre could certainly havernbeen used, those little ochre pieces dipped in water and used as a stamp forrnexample and maybe that identified those individuals as belonging to the samernclan or the same group.  There isrnextensive discovery of ochre pencils and as we know one of the frequentrnminerals that is used to decorate… rnI was recently with the some Masai people in Southern Tanzania, and itrnwas so interesting because I went to a wedding and they used this red earth tornpaint their faces, and here I appear, you know, looking very different and reallyrnfeeling like the other, like the outsider, and one of the elderly women came uprnto me and started painting my face, and a number of things happened.  The first thing that happened was Irnfelt I was included, that I was part of them, that they had accepted me and Irnfelt an intimacy with that person. rnYou know how it is.  We keeprna distance from one another.  Wernhave this personal space around us. rnDecorating each other has a very interesting byproduct, which isrndeveloping social bonds, and the other thing was that I felt like I couldrnparticipate and not just simply be an outside observer.  I was there to do photography, but Irnfelt like I was involved in that cultural ceremony of Masai marriage, and wernfind these 160,000-year-old, four times as old as Europe, implements of ochrernthat are clearly pencils, so people were decorating one another and themselvesrnand probably mostly each other, because they didn’t have mirrors, so they werernprobably decorating one another and this was like in a broad sense like whenrnyou look at nonhuman primates that groom one another.  It’s a way of developing and establishing social contact andrnsocial connectiveness and cohesiveness, so the earliest art really goes back tornSouthern Africa.  We find…  A little bit later we find piercedrnshells in the Serengeti.  We findrnthem in North Africa.  We find themrnin the Middle East, so Europe wasn’t really the place where the creativernexplosion happened.  It came alongrnwith us into Europe and developed over time to the point where you have thernfirst impressionists 25,000 years ago. rnI think that is the first sense I had when I walked into Lascaux in thernearly 1980s was, wow, here was a whole age of Impressionism that preceded ourrnage of Impressionism by 20,000 years.

Question: How do you assess the impact of human culture onrnour species’ evolution?

Donald Johanson: rnBiological evolution as articulated of course by Darwin and Wallace inrnthe 1800s explains and now with of course the great subject of genetics, whichrnreally helps us understand how features are inherited and altered and sornon.  Evolution explains **** ourrnbiological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures.  As the Dobzhansky said all animals arernunique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language,rnart, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from therncombination of traditional biological evolution.  We look biologically very different from say from Lucy, fromrnAustralopithecus, from homo erectus, from all these different species, sornbiologically we’ve evolved, but we are culturally just light years away fromrnNeanderthals, light years away from say early homo sapiens, so that biologicalrnevolution is culture is genetically buried very slow.  We still think I think in many ways with a hunter, gathererrnmentality, but cultural evolution as we know, I mean Paul Lazer, the man who isrnmy mentor, he was born in the late 1800s. rnImagine what he saw in terms of cultural evolution from the time he wasrna young teenager to the time when he died in his late ‘80s, so the culturalrnevolution has this sort of ratchet aspect to it that once you make arnsignificant leap to say putting information on a little chip that causes arngiant leap in the way we process information, store information, manipulaterninformation, so that we are a product of both biological and culturalrnevolution, which is an extraordinarily powerful combination.  The synergy of those two together isrnlike no other creature we have ever seen.

Question: What modern cultural or environmental changesrncould affect the future of human evolution?

Donald Johanson: rnWell, trying to predict the future biologically and evolutionary as tornwhere we’re going is a very difficult thing, but one thing that we are seeingrnis that the species, homo sapiens, which is a global species and that there arerndistinctive differences between different populations.  Some populations have a lighterrnskin.  Some populations have darkerrnskin and some people the epicanthic eye fold and others don’t, but there is more ofrna homogenization of people today. rnThose distinctive features that we see in different populations havernarisen because those populations had been isolated.  Well, today the species is interbreeding globally, so therernprobably is going to be more of a homogenization of some of the biologicalrnfeatures as well as some of the features that you mentioned, such as lactoserndeficiency and so on that may ultimately disappear, but I think there will bernmore of a homogenization of the species over time with increased spread ofrngenes between disparate populations. 

Question: What excites you the most about your currentrnresearch?

Donald Johanson:  rnWell I think the…  I’vernworked in the earlier periods, three to four million years ago.  What excites me probably more thanrnanything these days is the emergence of ourselves, the emergence ofrnanatomically and behaviorally modern humans.  For many years we thought that this was an explosivernmoment.  It was called the culturalrnexplosion or whatever, the cognitive explosion and what we’re beginning to findrnis that it is a sort of step by step development and most of those importantrnsteps were seminal in Africa, and I think that we’re going to be able to fleshrnout in much more detail the archeology, the paleoclimate, the biology and thernbehavior of the emergence of that creature, those creatures, early homornsapiens, that gave rise to all humans today, and it is my sense that all humansrntoday come out of Africa, so by implication, regardless of what we look like onrnthe outside, genetically, on the inside, everyone is an African.

Recorded on March 19, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen