Word: johanson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lucy was not much more than a meter tall (just under 4 ft.), suffered from arthritis and had a head like an ape. But last week she became a front-page celebrity. Anthropologist Donald Carl Johanson of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History called a press conference to claim that Lucy* is Australopithecus afarensis, a new species in man's evolutionary lineage. He put her age at 3.5 million years, which makes her younger than man's earliest known ancestor, Ramapithecus, who lived 10 million to 14 million years ago. But Johanson said Lucy came before the hominids...
Even before Johanson assembled Lucy's remaining bones, he could see that she had been bipedal: the clue was a telltale knee joint. In addition, Lucy's tiny skull suggested a brain too small to place her among previously discovered toolmaking hominids. At first, Johanson and his partner, Timothy White of the University of California at Berkeley, tentatively classified her as Australopithecus africanus, a species discovered in 1924 by South African Anthropologist Raymond Dart. The team changed its view after locating the bones of 13 creatures roughly similar to Lucy in the Afar region, and comparing them with...
...unknown in their fields. The co-editors quickly discovered that "the more eminent they were, the more ready to run to us with their ignorance." Some of the contributors are indeed eminent: Molecular Biologists Francis Crick and Sir John Kendrew. Chemist Linus Pauling (all Nobel laureates), Anthropologist Donald Johanson, Astronomers Sir Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Physicist John Wheeler. The conundrums they pose are also notable. How did the universe come into being? Why do we sleep? How are galaxies formed? What is consciousness? Why does a species become extinct? The problem that the experts had simply in formulating these...
...surge of discoveries in recent years has brought anthropologists closer to the answer. In 1972 Maurice Taieb, 40, of France's National Center for Scientific Research, and Donald Carl Johanson, 34, of Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, found stone tools dating back 2.6 million years in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Two years later their team made an even more dramatic discovery. Not far from their first find, they uncovered the fossilized remnants of a 20-year-old female Australopithecus lying in a layer of sediment 3 million years old. Unlike most other fossils...
Leakey's colleagues are making plans of their own in the continuing search. Prevented by war from continuing their work in Ethiopia, Johanson and Taieb plan to look for relics of early man in Arabia, where geological and climatic conditions are similar to those in the Afar region where Lucy was found. Pilbeam will soon go back to Pakistan in search of "new surprises." Simons is heading for Egypt in search of fossils that could enable him to trace man's roots back beyond Dryopithecus...