World of Scientific Discovery on Donald Carl Johanson
Johanson came from modest beginnings. His parents, Carl Torstgen Johanson and Salia Eugenia Johanson, were immigrants from Sweden. His father, a barber, died when Johanson was two years of age. Some time later, mother and son moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where she worked as a servant. A neighbor in Hartford taught anthropology, and he sparked the boy's interest in the subject. In high school, Johanson became interested in paleoanthropology, the study of fossils of human ancestors when he read about Louis and Mary Leakey's finds in Tanzania. In 1959, the Leakeys used the potassium-argon dating method to determine that their fossil skull of a hominid, Australopithecus boisei, was 1.8 million years old. Hominids are members of the human family. In 1962, they discovered Homo habilis, a true human fossil of about the same age. Johanson entered the University of Illinois as a chemistry major, but he changed to anthropology. In 1966, he earned his BA degree with honors. Johanson was mainly interested in paleontology, and he proceeded to do graduate work at the University of Chicago under the paleoanthropologist, F. Clark Howell. In 1974, Johanson earned his Ph.D.
degree in the field of anthropology. As a graduate student he studied at museums in Europe and Africa and participated in field expeditions in Ethiopia.
In 1972, Johanson joined the faculty of the department of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition, he assumed a position in anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He worked as researcher and curator at these institutions for nine years. In 1973, Johanson joined a team of scientists and students to search for early human fossils. They set up camp near the Awash River in the Hadar Valley of northeastern Ethiopia, an area rich in fossils. That year Johanson discovered a three million year old knee joint, fossil evidence of bipedal locomotion. In 1974, the team discovered fragments of four hominid skeletons. His greatest discovery came on November 30, 1974, when, along with graduate student Tom Gray, he unearthed a three million year old, three foot six inch (one meter five centimeter) tall, female hominid skeleton. The fossil was forty percent complete. The team of paleontologists called her Lucy after a song by the musical group, The Beatles, entitled, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Johanson decided that Lucy was too primitive a hominid to be classified as human, and classified her as Australopithicus (southern ape) afarensis ( the region she was found).
Discovering Lucy made Johanson famous. In the fall of 1975, he returned to Hadar with an expanded team and better financing. This time the team discovered a cluster of 200 fossil bones and teeth from a group of about thirteen members of Australopithicus afarensis. The cluster of hominids supported Johanson's belief that human intelligence has its roots in cooperative behavior. In 1976, Johanson established a major anthropology laboratory at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. This research center draws scholars from all over the world.
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