Word: johanson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most scientists agree that the small-brained australopithecines were the first manlike creatures to walk upright, 3.5 million or more years ago, and that their evolution ran parallel to that of humanity's direct ancestors. The dispute arises over details. Some researchers, including Anthropologist Donald Johanson, director of the Berkeley-based Institute of Human Origins, think that a single species, Australopithecus afarensis, which includes the celebrated 3 million-year-old skeleton called Lucy, was the common ancestor of all later australopithecines, as well as man. The two branches, they say, split about 3 million years ago, with the Australopithecus line...
...huge rear molars, enormous cheekbones and a pronounced crest of bone running along the top of the skull. But other features -- a for- ward-thrusting muzzle, an orangutan-size brain and an apelike jaw structure -- are primitive. Leakey believes this mosaic suggests, as he has argued for years, that Johanson is wrong and that his reconstruction of afarensis is actually based on two different species. And, Leakey says, the new fossil, labeled WT 17000, resembles one of them...
...inspired by the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which the scientists were playing on a tape recorder the night of the find.) White, in any case, has every reason to be cautious. In 1979 he and the leader of the Lucy expedition, Anthropologist Donald Johanson, touched off a major anthropological controversy by lumping Lucy and other East African fossils into a single new species, which they called Australopithecus afarensis (apeman from Afar). These Lucy-type creatures, they said, were common ancestors of two distinct hominid lines-the australopithecines, which presumably died out, and the strain that...
Their proposal was quickly | disputed by Anthropologist Richard Leakey. He said that White and Johanson's large afarensis males and small females were more likely two entirely different species that lived side by side some 3 million years ago. The temper of the debate was not helped by Johanson's 1981 book Lucy, which discussed the activities of the Leakey family in an intimate, gossipy way. Though the discovery of what may be an older version of Lucy seems to bolster the case for afarensis, partisans on both sides of the debate agree that more fossils will have...
...more than 2 million years old. Always giving credit where it is due, Leakey goes on to describe the earlier findings in South Africa of Raymond Dart and Robert Broom, who unearthed human ancestors more than 3 million years old, as well as to discuss Don Johanson's dramatic discovery of Lucy, the famous four-foot-tall Ethiopian who walked upright at least 3 million years ago. The find, Leakey notes, confirms that man's ancestors walked erect long before they began to develop the big brains that set them apart from more primal primates...