Donald Johanson

Donald Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist who discovered one of the most famous hominid fossils ever found, a roughly 3.2 million year old partial skeleton nicknamed Lucy, in the Afar region of Ethiopia in November 1974. Spotting a fragment of fossilized bone while surveying an eroded gully, Johanson and his team eventually recovered about forty percent of a single individual's skeleton, an unusually complete specimen for a hominid this ancient, allowing scientists to study body proportions, posture and locomotion in far more detail than earlier fragmentary finds had permitted. In 1978 Johanson, together with colleague Tim White, formally proposed that Lucy and related fossils from the region belonged to a previously undescribed species, Australopithecus afarensis, a claim that was controversial at the time but became widely accepted and established afarensis as a key early species on the human evolutionary lineage. Analysis of Lucy's skeleton, particularly her pelvis and leg bones, provided strong evidence that upright, two-legged walking evolved in human ancestors well before the marked increase in brain size that came much later in human evolution, reshaping scientific understanding of the order in which key human traits emerged. Johanson went on to found the Institute of Human Origins, a research center dedicated to the study of human evolutionary origins, and has remained an active researcher, writer and public communicator of paleoanthropology throughout his career.