Word: johanson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lucy was not much more than a meter tall (just under 4 ft.), suffered from arthritis and had a head like an ape. But last week she became a front-page celebrity. Anthropologist Donald Carl Johanson of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History called a press conference to claim that Lucy* is Australopithecus afarensis, a new species in man's evolutionary lineage. He put her age at 3.5 million years, which makes her younger than man's earliest known ancestor, Ramapithecus, who lived 10 million to 14 million years ago. But Johanson said Lucy came before the hominids...
Even before Johanson assembled Lucy's remaining bones, he could see that she had been bipedal: the clue was a telltale knee joint. In addition, Lucy's tiny skull suggested a brain too small to place her among previously discovered toolmaking hominids. At first, Johanson and his partner, Timothy White of the University of California at Berkeley, tentatively classified her as Australopithecus africanus, a species discovered in 1924 by South African Anthropologist Raymond Dart. The team changed its view after locating the bones of 13 creatures roughly similar to Lucy in the Afar region, and comparing them with...
...implications, says Johanson, are profound. First, the old notion that man became bipedal as his brain grew is certainly false: Lucy was small-brained, but could stand erect. Second, because Lucy is basically so primitive, man may have split from his ape ancestors much later than 15 million years ago, as is commonly supposed. Says Johanson: "Afarensis suggests that anthropologists might reopen the case of a divergence which occurred between 8 and 10 million years...
...Johanson's announcement, however, left most colleagues puzzled. The bones have been around for more than four years now, long since dated by potassium-argon tests, and many anthropologists who have studied them are generally convinced that Lucy is an Australopithecus africanus, not some new species...
...unknown in their fields. The co-editors quickly discovered that "the more eminent they were, the more ready to run to us with their ignorance." Some of the contributors are indeed eminent: Molecular Biologists Francis Crick and Sir John Kendrew. Chemist Linus Pauling (all Nobel laureates), Anthropologist Donald Johanson, Astronomers Sir Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Physicist John Wheeler. The conundrums they pose are also notable. How did the universe come into being? Why do we sleep? How are galaxies formed? What is consciousness? Why does a species become extinct? The problem that the experts had simply in formulating these...