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‘Lucy’ discoverer to speak at DeYor tonight
By Denise Dick
Youngstown
The most important woman in the career of Donald Johanson was 3 feet tall, weighed about 60 pounds and boasted a projecting, apelike face and a brain the size of a grapefruit.
She’s much older than he is, but that’s the attraction.
In 1974, Johanson, a paleoanthropologist, and another man discovered “Lucy,” a nearly complete, 3.2-million- year-old female skeleton while in Ethiopia. The discovery changed popular perception about evolution.
He was teaching at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, at the time. He later was curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
“She was also fairly complete,” said Johanson in a telephone interview earlier this week. “It said something about stature and the relationship between upper and lower limbs. She had short lower limbs and was more apelike than we had seen previously. It was a bridge between our apelike ancestry and the more modern one. At this stage, our ancestors were walking upright. Before this, we didn’t know how far back bipedalism stretched.”
Contrary to depictions of early humans roaming the plains, Lucy lived in forested areas, he said.
Johanson is the current and founding director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
He will speak at 7:30 p.m. today in the Ford Family Recital Hall of the DeYor Performing Arts Center in the city’s downtown. Question-and- answer and book-signing sessions will follow.
Tickets are available at the information desk in Kilcawley Center at Youngstown State University. If seating is available, people without tickets will be allowed to attend the lecture, too.
“Dr. Johanson is probably one of the premiere and eminent scholars in the field of human origins,” said Loren Leash, an associate professor in YSU’s sociology and anthropology department. “He set the benchmark and our knowledge of human evolution.”
In terms of the history of the world, homo sapiens are relatively young.
Skulls of what would be recognizable as homo sapiens date back about 200,000 years, he said.
“Modern humans are much more recent, about more than 100,000 years or a little older,” Johanson said.
He also was part of a team that in 1975 discovered a collection of fossils, dubbed the First Family. It was a collection of some 200 fossils at a single site.
It was the remains of infants, of young children, adult males and females,” Johanson said. “There were between 13 and 17 individuals who died in a catastrophic event.”
Lucy got her name from the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” During the team’s celebration of the discovery, the song was playing on a tape, and Johanson’s girlfriend suggested the name.
He wasn’t sold on the idea, but it took off.
The discovery was his defining moment, Johanson said.
“I was catapulted into the public eye,” he said. “People were very interested.”
Scholars from all over the world wanted to study the skeleton, and he was contacted to give lectures throughout the country.
His local lecture came about through the efforts of Mary Bowling, a YSU anthropology student, Lease said.
Bowling is interested in human evolution, and she contacted Johanson and the two corresponded via e-mail.
The lecture is sponsored by YSU’s Center for Applied History and the university’s Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, Biology Department, Dale Ethics Center, the Colleges of CLASS and STEM, the Office of the Provost, the Anthropology Colloquium, YSU Alumni and Phi Kappa Phi.