Donald Johanson
Donald Carl Johanson (born June 28, 1943) is an American paleoanthropologist. Along with Maurice Taieb and Yves Coppens, he is known for discovering the fossil of a female hominid australopithecine known as \"Lucy\" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia. Johanson was born in Chicago, Illinois and earned his bachelor\'s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1966. He earned his master\'s degree in 1970 and his PhD in 1974 from the University of Chicago. At the time of the discovery of Lucy, he was an assistant and associate professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. Johanson also holds an honorary doctorate from 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. He 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 hominid. Forty percent of the skeleton was eventually recovered, and later described as the first known member of Australopithecus afarensis. 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 biped, Lucy stood about three and a half feet tall, and added support to Raymond Dart\'s theory that australopithecines walked upright. Johanson and his team were also able to deduce from Lucy\'s ribs that she was vegetarian, and from her curved finger bones that she was probably at home in trees. Lucy herself was not at once recognized as a disparate species, but was considered an older member of Australopithecus africanus, and only the later discovery of skulls of A. afarensis convinced the general palaeontological world that Lucy represents a species called afarensis. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey won a 1982 U.S. National Book Award in Science[a] for the first popular book about this work, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.
