Word: johanson
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...turned to rock and so, gradually, did her bones. She might have rested there undisturbed forever but for the roaring geologic forces that ripped the earth apart over the next 30,000 centuries, finally thrusting the long-buried fossil bones to the surface -- where American anthropologist Donald Johanson would find them in 1974. Named Lucy, after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, this long-dead primate, half-a-million years older than any known human- related species, revolutionized scientists' understanding of human origins...
That remarkable discovery is the departure point for In Search of Human Origins, a three-hour Nova mini-series that airs on PBS next week. Over three consecutive nights, beginning Monday, Johanson himself is the tour guide on a journey through the physical and intellectual landscape of human evolution. Starting with the 3-ft.-tall, small-brained Lucy and her kin, he traces the ascent of humankind through some of its milestones: the emergence of toolmaking, the transition from scavenging to hunting and the struggle between the first modern humans and their Neanderthal cousins for control of the earth...
...Johanson, though a little stiff at times, is a capable guide, narrating and often participating in a mix of on-location filming, talking-head interviews and dramatic re-creations, both historic and prehistoric. In some of the most impressive segments, actors in ingenious makeup, moving with a quasi-simian gait, bring Lucy and other protohumans eerily to life...
...things make Origins more compelling than most science programs. The producers avoided the temptation to be encyclopedic and thereby to overwhelm viewers with information. And Johanson doesn't simply present facts. He shows how paleoanthropologists actually work, how they uncover fossils (the hard part) and how they analyze what they've found (the harder part). The earliest hint that his team had discovered an especially ancient human ancestor was a single knee joint plucked from the African dirt. It was old -- carefully dated volcanic ash in nearby rocks proved that. But it took laborious work by anatomist Owen Lovejoy...
...Observes Johanson: "The new specimen suggests that the body pattern we call modern did not appear until Homo erectus and that it happened fairly rapidly." Says White, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley: "The question is, Why did they lose those features, and what made them change in just 200,000 years...