CLEVELAND, Ohio - The scientist famous for finding Lucy is turning up again himself.
On Oct. 25, Donald Johanson will speak at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for the first time since resigning there 38 years ago.
He was still on staff in 1974, when he and comrades, several from Cleveland, scoured the hot Ethiopian badlands and found the oldest and most complete set of fossils to that date from a hominid, a member of the animal family that includes humans.
Since then, scientists have found much older and more complete hominids. But they still consider Lucy’s skeleton, about 40 percent complete and an estimated 3.2 million years old, to be a breakthrough inspiring researchers and shaping knowledge of our ancestry.
Yohannes Haile-Selaissie, another leading hominid hunter and the museum’s current curator of physical anthropology, said recently, “Lucy is like the icon of our field. She’s never lost her value as one of the most significant specimens.”
Johanson has excelled not just at finding hominids but publicizing them. He and Lucy have starred on the Today show, on the Public Broadcasting System, in National Geographic, in Time and more.
In 1976, The Plain Dealer enthused, "The very appealing Johanson is one of the most handsome and brilliant bachelors in the country." He drove a sports car and dated actress Morgan Fairchild. He co-wrote several popular books and hosted shows about his field. He earned a National Book Award and an Emmy nomination.
In phone interviews, Johanson said that the publicity has helped draw recruits and funds to his field.
“People are excited about understanding human origins. It’s one of the first questions we ask Mommy. ‘Where do I come from?’”
Over the years, the outspoken Johanson has clashed with others about science, funds, creationism and more. He said, “It’s a highly fractious field, often with quite personal attacks.”
Johanson will discuss “Cleveland, Lucy and Human Origins,” at 7 p.m. on the 25th with a sellout crowd in the museum’s Explorer Lecture Series. He said the talk is the first he’s been asked to give there since his resignation.
After 38 years of turnover, museum officials said they couldn’t confirm or explain the delay. Haile-Selassie, on staff since 2002, declined to comment.
But Johanson’s not complaining. “I am absolutely thrilled to be invited back to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Those were my early and important days in my development as one of the leaders in paleoanthropology. I have great friends in Cleveland and at the museum. I’m very excited to share what Lucy’s doing these days,” he said, having given Lucy a sort of second life.
Johanson’s life began 76 years ago in Chicago, with Swedish immigrant parents. His father, a barber, died when the son was 2. His mother, who cleaned houses, moved with Donald to Hartford, Conn. There an anthropologist neighbor inspired the young Donald.
Johanson earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s and doctorate at the University of Chicago. He began searching Ethiopia for fossils in 1970 and came to focus on the Afar region, whose unstable ground often exposes long-buried fossils.
He joined the Cleveland museum in 1972 and later became its anthropology curator and research director. He also taught at Case Western Reserve University, Kent State University and what’s now Northeast Ohio Medical University.
In 1973, he found leg bones about 3 million years old from the earliest hominid then known who apparently walked upright.
A year later, Johanson was coaxed from paperwork there one day to show Case Western grad student Tom Gray a spot to be marked in a map. As long as they were there, the scientists spent a couple hours in fierce midday sun checking the dusty, barren, seemingly unpromising area for fossils. They finally agreed to head back to camp.
Then, from the corner of his eye, Johanson caught a glinting fragment of bone on the ground, about two inches long, shaped like a wrench. He picked it up. It seemed to be part of a hominid elbow. He looked around and found several fragments of thigh, rib, backbone and skull.
As Johanson later wrote, “Most dedicated fossil hunters spend the majority of their lives in the field without finding anything remarkable, and there I was, a thirty-one-year-old newly minted Ph.D., staring at my childhood dream at my feet.”
The fragments seemed to come from an adult female, who’d be smaller than a male. Johanson wrapped a couple chunks in his bandanna, stuck them under his hat, marked the spot with care, and returned to camp with Gray in triumph.
That night, the crew celebrated with roasted goat, beer smuggled into camp and the sounds of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. Soon the hit “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” rang out. The crew promptly dubbed the hominid Lucy.
Johanson resisted the name awhile, preferring a native worker’s suggestion of Dinkinesh, an Ethiopian word for marvelous. But Lucy caught on.
Soon the team scoured the site. Lucy appeared to have been about 3 ½ feet tall. She seemed to have walked upright even earlier than Johanson’s find of the year before.
Her finger bones were curved like a tree climber’s. Her ribs were shaped like a vegetarian’s. Her skull was small, challenging previous beliefs that big brains preceded upright strides.
A year later, Johanson and his team found teeth and bones nearby from at least 13 hominids about Lucy’s age. They borrowed their finds from Ethiopia for five years of study and casting in Cleveland.
At first, experts thought Lucy and her neighbors belonged to a previously known species, Australopithecus africanus. In 1978, Johanson declared a new species for her and the First Family: Australopithecus afarensis, named for the region. Fellow scientists slowly came to agree.
Johanson left Cleveland in 1981 to create the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, Calif. In 1997, he moved the institute to Arizona State University. Over the decades, he has scoured Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Tanzania as well as Ethiopia again.
Now he thinks he’s now too old for work in the field, and he’s also stepped down as his institute’s director. But he still works there and teaches at Arizona State.
The single man has two stepsons and an adoptive Ethiopian son. His many awards include honorary doctorates from John Carroll University, the College of Wooster and elsewhere.
An asteroid considered revealing of the universe’s origins has been named Donaldjohanson. NASA plans to send a spaceship named Lucy to check it out.
Johanson has also won awards for championing atheism. But he said you don’t have to reject faith to accept science.
“I don’t think science is attacking religion. It’s another way of seeing the world. Science enlightens us about our place in nature. We’re not above nature. We’re part of it. Science will play a increasing role in the survival of our own species.”
Johanson has seldom returned to Cleveland. In 2014, he spoke at Case Western but said he had no time to swing by the museum. He finally returned there in April for a scientific conference. Haile-Selassie gave him a tour.