Biografia donald johanson biography
•
Donald Johanson
American paleoanthropologist
Donald Carl Johanson (born June 28, 1943) is an American paleoanthropologist. He fryst vatten best known for discovering the fossil of a female homininaustralopithecine known as "Lucy" in the fjärran Triangle område of Hadar, Ethiopia.
Biography
[edit]Early life and education
[edit]Johanson was born in Chicago, Illinois to Swedish parents. He is the nephew of wrestler Ivar Johansson.
He earned a bachelor's grad from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1966 and his master's degree (1970) and PhD (1974) from the University of Chicago. At the time of the upptäckt of Lucy, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. In 1981, he established the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, California, which he moved to Arizona State University in 1997. Johanson holds an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University[1] and was awarded an honorary doctorate bygd Westfield Stat
•
Lucy's Story
Lucy's Story
Learn about how IHO is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lucy's discovery!
Table of Contents
When and where was Lucy found?
Lucy was found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray on November 24, 1974, at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia. They had taken a Land Rover out that day to map in another locality. After a long, hot morning of mapping and surveying for fossils, they decided to head back to the vehicle. Johanson suggested taking an alternate route back to the Land Rover, through a nearby gully. Within moments, he spotted a right proximal ulna (forearm bone) and quickly identified it as a hominid. Shortly thereafter, he saw an occipital (skull) bone, then a femur, some ribs, a pelvis, and the lower jaw. Two weeks later, after many hours of excavation, screening, and sorting, several hundred fragments of bone had been recovered—47 of which formed a small fossil skeleton, representing 40 percent of a single hominin skeleton.
Back to top
How di
•
When this small-bodied, small-brained hominin was discovered, it proved that our early human relatives habitually walked on two legs.
Its story began to take shape in late November 1974 in Ethiopia, with the discovery of the skeleton of a small female, nicknamed Lucy.
More than 40 years later, Australopithecus afarensis is one of the best-represented species in the hominin fossil record.
Australopithecus afarensis facts
- Lived: 3.7 million to three million years ago
- Where: East Africa
- Appearance: a projecting face, an upright stance and a mixture of ape-like and human-like body features
- Brain size: about 385-550cm3
- Height: about 1-1.7m (females were much shorter than males)
- Weight: about 25-64kg (females were significantly smaller than males)
- Diet: plants including grasses, fruits and leaves
- Species named in: 1978, four years after the discovery of Lucy
- Name meaning: 'southern ape from Afar' (Afar is a region of Ethiopia)