Donald Johanson

Donald Carl Johanson was born on June 28, 1943, in Chicago, to a family of Swedish descent. He began his studies in anthropology at the University of Illinois and later continued at the University of Chicago under F. Clark Howell, earning his doctorate in 1974.

The defining moment of Johanson's career came on November 24, 1974, at Hadar in Ethiopia's Rift Valley, where he and his colleagues discovered the partial skeleton of a female hominin later named "Lucy" — after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which was playing at the expedition camp the night of the find. Belonging to Australopithecus afarensis and dated to roughly 3.2 million years ago, the fossil preserved about forty percent of the skeleton, making it one of the most complete hominin fossils known at the time.

In 1981 Johanson founded the Institute of Human Origins, later relocating it to Arizona State University. Alongside Tim White and Yves Coppens, he played a key role in the scientific description and classification of Australopithecus afarensis. He authored several books, including "Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind" (with Maitland Edey), "Lucy's Child," and "From Lucy to Language," some of which reached wide popular audiences.

The discovery of Lucy demonstrated that bipedalism emerged well before significant brain enlargement in human evolutionary history, overturning earlier assumptions about the sequence in which human traits developed. Lucy remains one of the most famous and influential fossils in the history of paleoanthropology.