MALE SPEAKER: Thank you all for joining us this afternoon
for another Talks at Google event.
We have today, Doctor Don Johanson.
He's the discoverer of Lucy.
Ever since finding that skeleton, that hominid,
his team has discovered over 350 skeletons of that same species.
So it's really an amazing story.
For over 40 years he's led this program
and currently is working on the Institute for Human Origins,
if I'm not mistaken.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: Of.
MALE SPEAKER: Of Human Origins.
Institute of Human Origins.
And so he'll talk to us about that as well.
He is also speaking on behalf of his book, "Lucy's Legacy."
So with that, please join me in welcoming Doctor Johanson
to Google.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: Thanks very much.
It was so convenient to have somebody pick me up
at my house in San Francisco and drive me down here.
I actually finished my talk in the backseat of the car.
But I'm happy to have an opportunity
to speak at Google, an organization
that absolutely everybody knows about.
And if they don't, they can Google it.
So I have had a wonderful privilege of fulfilling
a childhood dream.
And I'm a professor at Arizona State University, although I'm
living here and teaching only online, which
I'll mention in a bit.
But I try to tease out those students who really
have a passion for something.
And I think, probably, that's the most difficult thing
in education in this country right now,
is that so many students don't have a passion or a commitment
to something at a young age.
And they flounder or they say things.
They'll come into my office and they'll say,
well jeez, there's nothing left to do in the world.
And I was fortunate in having a childhood dream.
I read a book when I was 13 years old
called "Man's Place in Nature" by Thomas Henry
Huxley, who was one of Charles Darwin's closest buddies.
He was often called, as you may remember, Darwin's bulldog,
because he was really the proselytizer, in many ways,
for Darwin's paradigmatic shift.
And to use that word carefully, that
was a really paradigm shift.
Can we turn the lights down a little bit?
That would be great.
And he gave public lectures throughout Great Britain
on evolution and Darwin's "Origin of Species."
And he thought it was terribly important to understand
our place in nature and called his book
"Man's Place in Nature."
And one of the conclusions that both he and Darwin came to
was that the idea of natural selection,
a descent with modification, and so on,
is not restricted just to non-human creatures,
that it was also applicable to the human species.
And they concluded that, based on the similarities of apes
and humans, particularly African apes
like chimps and especially chimps and gorillas,
that we shared a common ancestor.
That's one of the tenants of evolutionary thought,
that there is descent from a common ancestor.
And they predicted at a time when
anthropologists, biologists, geologists
were extraordinarily euro-centric in terms
of understanding human origins and pinpointing
Europe as the finishing school for humanity.
And it wasn't until the mid 1920s
that fossils that were discernibly
on the human family tree of great antiquity
began to be discovered.
And reading that book as a young teenager,
I was absolutely riveted by the idea
that we shared a common ancestor with the extant apes,
and that there was, at least at that time, the beginnings
of discoveries like Neanderthals from Germany and France,
and also a cro-magnon, as we call them,
Homo sapiens from southern France.
And I wanted, as a young student,
to be part of that search.
And I fortunately was accepted to an undergraduate school,
University of Illinois, where I studied anthropology and then
went on to the University of Chicago where I did my Ph.D.
with a professor who I sought out
who had an expedition in Ethiopia, in Africa.
And I sort of talked my way onto that dig
and spent my first year in Africa in the summer of 1970.
So that's 45 years ago.
And when I first entered the field
of what's called paleo-anthropology-- the study
of human origins, not the study of old anthropologists.
But when I first entered the field of paleoanthropology,
we had about six different species
on the human family tree.
Today we have upwards of 23, 24 different species.
So that the tree of human evolution
has become exceedingly complex.
Today I've chosen to give some of the biological background
to being human.
One of the questions that we all ask ourselves,
whether you're philosophers, anthropologists,
whether you're in the tech business
or whatever, what is it that makes us human?
And this is, of course, the quintessential question
of anthropology, which is the study of humankind.
And it's always been studied from a cultural point of view.
People will say, well, you know what makes us human
is we sing, we paint, we dance.
Every society has some creation myth of some sort.
And so on.
These are, I think, really the results of three core areas
that we're beginning to study.
Oh, and by the way, if anybody is
thinking of tweeting anything, I'll give you these addresses.
And central to understanding what makes us human
is really this sort of interactive evolutionary
dynamic between cultural evolution on the one hand
and biological evolution on the other hand.
I say that it's very important to reinsert
the idea of biological evolution,
because anthropologists not far from here,
in a little school over in Stanford, at Stanford,
had a schism in its anthropology department
a number of years ago.
Because many of the cultural-- social-cultural
anthropologists-- thought that once culture comes in the door,
biology jumps out the window.
And that we are no longer part of the natural world.
We are, as one anthropologist Alfred Kroger wrote,
super organic beyond culture.
And I think we have to really understand
the biological roots of who we are and how that, in many ways,
set us up to be the most dominant, the most
intelligent, the most creative, and at the same time,
unfortunately, the most destructive species we know
of in our solar system, and perhaps anywhere
in the universe, which is a rather provocative issue.
But certainly on this planet, we are in control.
And how did that happen?
And I'm going to just touch on this at the beginning
because the Institute of Human Origins,
which is located at Arizona State University,
grew out of an idea I had in 1981 when I moved to Berkeley
and founded this research institute.
I wanted a place that was dedicated
to the pursuit of finding the cultural remains
and the fossil remains of our ancestors
and try to fit them-- can these lights come down any more?
MALE SPEAKER: Unfortunately not for the video.
I'm sorry about that.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: Oh, OK.
I wanted a place where we sort of had
a group of paleoanthropologists, geologists, archaeologists,
people who were dating rocks and so on,
came together under the rubric of a single research institute
to pursue the past.
And in 1997, that organization was acquired by Arizona State
University, providing us with greatly expanded opportunities,
and also the opportunity to leave descendants,
which is, after all, the goal of all evolution.
We were now leaving students.
And before we were not.
And moving there, we recently began
to move out into other areas and try
to understand the evolutionary foundations
of human uniqueness.
Because if you read people like Steven Pinker
in "The Language Instinct," and others
who are evolutionary biologists, much of what we're looking at
must have some explanation that can be rooted deeply
in the whole idea of natural selection.
And that we are who we are because
of that intangible force that we call natural selection.
So the rubric that we're working on, we
have about 14 different teams working in different places,
everybody from psychologists to field archaeologists and so on,
is to understand the evolutionary interplay
of these three major insights, I think, into what make us human.
We lead lives of extraordinary cognitive complexity.
No other animal comes close to the cognitive complexity
that we have.
And we have an extraordinarily expensive organ,
which is called the brain, which demands a lot of energy.
A different way of eating and different foodstuffs and so on.
And the abilities to gain those.
And we communicate through symbolic language.
No other animals do that.
No chimpanzees as close as we can
get to ourselves, who do sign and so on, talk
about tomorrow or yesterday, or what's
going on in the next room.
So we are remarkably unique in that regard.
Second, we have a capacity for culture that is unsurpassed.
And particularly our culture is cumulative.
And people here at Google, people
in this part of the world, in Silicon Valley, so to speak,
understand what that means.
Biological evolution is glacially slow.
Over a very long period, very minor changes occur.
But in terms of our culture, whether it's
technology or what, our advances are cumulative.
So once culture begins to be our sort of savior,
in the sense that everything we do is filtered through culture,
you have a growth like that, which
is extraordinary and unique and different
from any other creature that we know of.
And thirdly, although it may not seem like this when you open up
your morning news, humans are the most cooperative
of any vertebrae on the planet.
No other creatures, no other species
come anywhere close to cooperating.
If we were a chimpanzee troop, for example, male dominated,
of course, and a male chimp from another troop came in,
we would kill him and eat him.
We cooperate more extensively with each other
than anyone else, any other species on the planet.
And at the moment, this is a work in progress.
And maybe if I'm invited back once we
have spent a few years looking at this,
we may reveal some very interesting deeper
understanding of what it is that makes us human.
And interestingly, this is a proposal
that is supported by the Templeton Foundation, which
is a very religious foundation as you may know.
Templeton supported research in various fields,
but you had to tie it and try to make science and religion
kind of fit comfortably in the same textbook.
And there are no such restraints based on us.
Well, as I said, there were very few species
of fossils when I first started working
in 1970, species of humans.
But today we have a fossil record that takes us back
to about 6 million years.
We came from something, like you see on the left here, much more
ape-like, with a projecting face, a brain about the size
of a couple of cups of coffee that we
have in the morning, about 380, 400 cubic centimeters.
Walking upright.
And these creatures we collectively
call Australopithecus, or ape man, as
they are sometimes called.
And they take us back to about 6 million years ago.
And the one feature we see that continues back
that far is upright bipedalism, what I'm doing right now.
And freeing our hands from locomotion.
And beginning to use them for other ways of manipulating
the world around us.
It's interesting looking at this because as we
grasp a branch on the human family tree,
the roots all lead back to Africa.
It's where we had a common ancestor with the African apes.
It's where we first stood up about 6 million years ago.
It's where we first began, in the middle, to expand brains.
Lucy's brain was about, as I said,
about 400 cubic centimeters.
Our brains are about 1,400 cubic centimeters.
It's where our ancestors began to fashion stone tools
in a very regular way at about 2.8,
maybe 3, maybe 3.4 million years ago.
It's a big debate right now about that.
Where our bodies were transformed
from ape-like bodies that had very short lower limbs
to having very long lower limbs, which is our lever
arm for getting around.
Right on up to the emergence of Homo sapiens at 200,000 years.
So all these features that we think of biologically,
and culturally in terms of the birth of culture with stone
tools, and probably culture before
that with things that don't preserve in the fossil record,
all premiered in Africa.
So I'd like to look at no specific place in Africa
as the cradle of humankind, rather Africa
as a crucible where all of this experimentation was going on.
I told you that I read Huxley.
I didn't read Darwin till a little bit later.
He only had one, not very interesting, black and white
diagram in his book.
Huxley had pictures of apes and neanderthals and stuff.
And Darwin shied away, as you know, from talking
about human origins.
He was particularly worried about upsetting
Emma, his wife, who was a very devout religious person.
But you have to read "The Origin of Species"
to the last page, the second to the last paragraph,
before he says, "light will be thrown on the origin
of man and his history."
And that's all he said.
That was enough.
But it's true that he tried to stay away
from this because he didn't want to upset Victorian England.
He didn't want to be the center of great controversy.
And yet later on, after chewing on this idea for so long,
in 1871 he wrote a book called "The Descent of Man."
And wrote up a number of scenarios
of how we became human.
He and Huxley would go to the zoo and they'd see chimpanzees.
And they'd see how similar they are.
I'm sure everyone in this room has seen a Jane Goodall
documentary or gone to a zoo and looked
into the eyes of a creature that is remarkably
reminiscent of maybe somebody you know.
And there's no doubt that they are not only
very similar in their appearance,
but details of their anatomy as Darwin and Huxley
examined their teeth and jaws, are very similar to ours.
And from the work of people like Goodall and many others,
there are certain behaviors that are reminiscent of who we are.
They certainly experience a wide range of emotions
that we would have traditionally thought of as only being human.
And with the Human Genome Project and the Chimp Genome
Project, chimps aren't running that project, but the Chimp
Genome Project, we're about 99% identical
in terms of our DNA, which is one
of those homologous features that really shows us that there
was a common ancestry there.
And it was not too far distant in the past.
So there's no longer any question among most people
that these two creatures shared some sort of a common ancestor
somewhere about 8 million years ago on the continent of Africa.
One of the features in Africa that
has been so beneficial to us is one
of the great geological structures
on the planet, which is the Great Rift Valley.
It runs all the way from Mozambique in the south,
divides here, and continues up through Tanzania and Kenya,
and up into the Horn of Africa, which
is this area just up in here, the little triangular area
known as the Afar Triangle.
And that was an area that was really terra incognita
until the late 1960s.
I made my first visit there with a French geologist who
had been exploring that area.
He had found bones of big animals.
He didn't know what they were.
They were elephants, and pigs, and rhinos, and monkeys,
and antelopes, and so on.
And during the course of his work,
I met him in Paris at a cocktail party and he said,
you should come with me.
And I did.
And this is the place where I have worked since 1972.
You see the Rift Valley.
You see Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
The Rift Valley, this is Lake Turkana, which
used to be lake Rudolf, continues up here
into that very large triangular area, which is, much of it,
below sea level.
It is where the Horn of Africa, due to continental drift,
is beginning to move away.
And it is rifting the surface of the face of Africa.
And very ancient geological layers
are being resurrected, because they're
being now eroded and exposed.
And this is a classic picture.
This is the first view I had of the site of Hadar,
as it's called.
It's a local name, an Afar name, the Afar people who live there.
And as far as you can see in the distance
you see these beautiful badlands.
And there are a number of features
in there in the distance which are very light colored.
And those happen to be volcanic ashes.
And those volcanic ashes lend themselves to argon dating.
So we can tell, in a precise way,
how old these geological strata are
by doing potassium argon or argon argon analysis.
And they are very horizontal, as you can see.
They have not been disturbed very much by tectonics.
And in addition to that, you can't see it quite as well
here, but they're fairly fine grained,
which meant that the deposition was
a very slow, quiet deposition.
It wasn't a raging river that breaks up bones and distributes
them.
It records and preserves and fossilized things in place.
And here is an aerial view.
I did a little work for-- I think
this was a "NOVA" program-- a couple of years ago.
And took some photos.
We were very fortunate, there was
a river running right through here,
so we had a permanent source of water.
We're out there for three months a year, two and a half,
three months a year.
And I don't know how many of you have spotted my camp,
but that's where we camped for two and a half to three months,
in the middle of nowhere, which means we have
to bring everything with us.
There's no Walgreens down the street, or Safeway.
So it is a very remote place.
It is dangerous in many, many ways.
Lots of snakes.
But also there are two rival tribes
that live on either side of that river.
And we've worked north of the river, which
is towards the top of the screen, since 1972.
We wanted to work south of the river
but we're unable to because of the nature of the people
there who like to shoot you.
So we've continued to work there over the years.
And here's a closer view of camp, what it looks like.
Various tents set up for personal tents.
This is a work tent over here.
There's a kitchen tent.
There's an eating tent.
And a team of scholars and students
will go out there for two and a half to three months
to regularly search for, excavate,
and hopefully discover remains of our ancestors.
It is, as I said, a fairly hostile region.
The Afar people, the first year I worked there our camp
was burglarized in the middle of the night by these people.
They didn't know who we were.
Fortunately we didn't get shot.
But over the years we've made great friends with them,
and they are regular participants
in the explorations in these expeditions.
So we worked there between the early '70s and 1980,
when Mengistu took over Ethiopia and Haile Selassie was deposed.
And this is a typical group of paleoanthropologists,
and geologists, archaeologists, fossil pollen specialists, pig
specialists, elephant specialists, kitchen crew,
and so forth and so on.
And I may be here talking about these in these spotlights,
but if it wasn't for this integrative effort,
this multi-disciplinary approach,
I wouldn't be able to tell you the details
that I'm going to tell you.
Work continues now at night.
The romanticism of the kerosene lamps is long gone.
We have solar panels.
So we have electricity.
And we can charge up our computers.
And we can communicate with the rest of the world.
And sometimes people work in the evening, as you saw.
And there's really no way to find these fossils except
to go out, and walk, and look, and walk, and look.
And to hope that your eyes will fall on something exciting.
These fossils, this is an elephant foot
that is eroding out of-- actually on top of it
was a beach sand.
Below it is deeper water deposition, interestingly.
So it meant that the lake was probably
receding at this point.
And you see a small group of people
in the background for scale.
And you might spend three or four or five days
in there with a team of five or six people.
But this elephant, 3.4 million years old, was found in place
and still, incredibly, hard to believe,
it's still articulated.
So regularly research or survey teams like this will go out.
And with a trained eye, try to find these fossils that
have eroded out from their ancient beds
where they've sort of lain in suspended
animation for millions of years, and give us better insight
into our early human ancestors.
Sometimes it's a discovery a single tooth,
like this, that led to an entire face of one
of these early Australopithecus creatures.
You see in the background a team of people
who are beginning to set up a screening operation
and have cleaned this slope totally of the loose sediment
on top and recovered most of a single face.
In 1974 I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.
And went out to Ethiopia for my first major, full scale
expedition.
And had some National Science Foundation
money that got us out there.
And that fall, in November, at this locality
where you see the people standing,
I made a discovery of a partial skeleton, which has now become
more or less iconic, a skeleton that was nicknamed Lucy,
after "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,"
the Beatles song that was playing in camp the night
of her discovery.
And one of our expedition members,
Pamela, said, well, if you think it's a female,
why don't you call her Lucy?
And she picked up that moniker and has
been known as Lucy ever since.
Well, what did I find?
The first piece I found was not a molar,
it was this little fragmentary piece
of bone, which is the elbow on the right side.
It is the ulna, the bone that allows you to flex and extend.
As you can see, it's like a little wrench.
It's not the one that turns your forearm,
but the one that flexes and extends.
And I kneel down and looked at it
and knew virtually immediately, from its anatomy,
there are features in almost every bone
we pick up that easily differentiate
between human and non-human.
The only thing it could have been was a baboon.
It was the right size for a fossil baboon,
but it didn't have the right kind of anatomy
on the backside of it.
It had our kind of anatomy.
And then on the left, you see a much younger and thinner me
with my graduate student who is doing all the work,
but that's what they do, wrapping up
each and every fragment here in toilet paper.
We have these huge boxes of toilet paper
that follow us to the field.
And marking each spot where the large bones were discovered
before we started systematically scraping and cleaning
and screening and so on.
So it was that single bone that led to an excavation
where we had a small team out there, a team of geologists,
anatomists, paleontologists, and so on,
screening every part of this hill.
And this is a photograph of the first time
ever that these bones were more or less
re-articulated after 3.2 million years.
We knew at the time that it was older than three million years.
We didn't know how old exactly.
This is the French colleague, Maurice Taieb
who was so generous in inviting an international team to come
and work.
And we basically had a French and American team
working there.
And this is the image which has become so iconic,
a partial skeleton.
Unfortunately, the skull eroded out first and rolled down
the hill and broke up.
So all we have are fragments of the brain case.
But importantly, enough of the back and the sides to give us
this cranial capacity estimate.
And a number of things were important about her.
We had her pelvis, which is a very fragmentary and fragile
part of the body, which tells us a lot about locomotion.
And we had the knee, and we had the ankle.
And it was clear from the detailed anatomy,
working with an orthopedic surgeon,
that in every one of these anatomical regions so
important for reconstructing locomotion,
this was a creature that was fully upright and bipedal
on the ground as we are.
Clearly her legs were very short.
If you compare the length of the upper arm bone, the humerus,
with the thigh bone on the lower right there, the femur,
they're almost of equal length.
As you see if you just look at your own body,
your thigh bone or femur is much longer than this,
because as I said, our lower limb is our lever
arm for getting around.
She was clearly very different in terms of details of teeth
and jaws and skull and so on.
And a distinctive new species of Australopithecus.
And I named her after the Afar people in the Afar region.
She is known in Ethiopia by her own name.
She's known as Dinknesh, which in Amharic means
you are wonderful.
But regularly driving around Ethiopia in the countryside,
you'll come across something like this, Lucy College.
There are Lucy cafes.
There are Lucy magazines.
The national soccer team of Ethiopia, woman's soccer team,
is named Lucy.
There's a Lucy Cup in soccer.
So she's known more often as Lucy
than as Dinknesh, which is commemorated in this stamp that
was minted in 1985.
So this is more or less what the complete reconstructed body
would look like.
And as you heard, we now have many, many different specimens.
We have at Hadar itself, 90% of the sample that
represents Afarensis and that's about 400 specimens.
And I know there are undescribed in Ethiopia in the museum where
Lucy is stored, all these fossils are back
in the capital in the National Museum,
that there are another 300 or so specimens.
It is a species that lived between about 3 million years
and 3.4 million years.
So it's one of the longest lived species we know
of in the human fossil record.
We've been around for, as we are now, maybe 100,000 years.
So her species was an enduring species.
It's found throughout eastern Africa, what
is today Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, out in Chad,
for example, in North Central Africa.
And in 1976, Doctor Mary Leakey who was in charge of work
with her husband Louis Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, which
some of you may have visited or certainly know about it,
came to visit me in the field with her son Richard Leakey.
And bedazzled by the fossils that we were finding.
We hadn't found Lucy yet, but she
was encouraged to go back to a site in Tanzania
where she and her husband had worked in the late '30s
and didn't find any hominids, didn't
find any human ancestors.
But it was about the same age as the Lucy site.
And they found a trail of human footprints impressed
in a volcanic ash that's 3.6 million years old.
And there was a volcano that was erupting in that area.
It was a special kind of volcanic ash.
It was a carbonitite.
It had a lot of carbonates in it.
So it was at the beginning of a rainy season.
And when it covered the surface--
there was a light rain, because you can see raindrops in there.
And a couple of human ancestors that
were of the same species, because we now have the teeth
and jaws of this species at this site
called Laetoli, walked across that surface
and left imprints of their feet.
And it's like all of us in this room going to the beach
and walking in moist sand, let's say at sunset,
then looking back.
That's what our footprint looks like.
But this footprint is 3.6 million years old.
It's got a strong heel strike.
It's got a strong toe off.
It's got a transverse and longitudinal arch to the foot.
And this was all predicted on the fossils that we had found.
And it really documents in a way we never thought was possible.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-And what about Lucy herself?
What did she look like?
We know from the teeth, the jaw, and now the skull
fragments we found, that Lucy had
an ape-like face, with the brain just a little larger
than a chimps.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: A piece I did for a three part series
for "NOVA."
It's an animatronic.
-She may have had dark skin and patchy hair
to protect her from the sun.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: We know chimpanzees do this.
And I thought if chimps can do it, why can't Lucy.
Termites are great if they're roasted.
I don't like them raw.
If you ever go, get roasted.
They're wonderful.
-Walking upright freed her hands to develop a more precise grip
than other apes, more like our own.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: And the hand
bones that we have [INAUDIBLE] certainly capable of finding
different [INAUDIBLE].
-And even with her small brain, perhaps she
was beginning to have a more human-like awareness of herself
and her surroundings.
Lucy and her kind must been extraordinary creatures.
We know that they persisted as a species virtually unchanged
for over a million years.
[END PLAYBACK]
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: So this was a long lived species,
which is very important, and geographically widespread,
meaning it lived in a series of different habitats.
And more recently we have begun to find more complete skulls.
For instance, this is a beautifully complete 3.1
million year old, 3.2 million year old skull,
meaning the face, the brain case, and the lower
jaw, of what a female of Lucy's species would look like.
And it's allowed paleoartists to reconstruct,
I think more accurately, the shape of the face,
much more ape-like as you would imagine.
And we've also begun to find complete skulls of males,
which are considerably larger than females.
So there was a lot of sexual dimorphism
between males and females.
Lucy is, as people say, probably the best known fossil
of the 20th century.
And has certainly become the benchmark
by which other discoveries are judged.
If something new is found, like recently you
saw in the "National Geographic" magazine,
they immediately say older than Lucy, or younger than Lucy,
or more complete than Lucy, or maybe an ancestor to Lucy,
or maybe one of Lucy's descendants.
And she has become part of our vernacular.
If you watch "Jeopardy," occasionally
she appears on there.
She appears in crossword puzzles when
the little clue is human ancestor
begins with L, four letters.
My favorite one appeared in, I think
it was, "Science" magazine, where
Lucy goes to a cocktail party.
He says, oh, not the Lucy?
So she's become very widely known
as kind of the ambassador.
And also, most recently, I don't know
how many of you saw, believe it or not,
Scarlett Johansson-- spells her name
with two S's as my parents did-- did this movie called "Lucy."
Anybody see this movie?
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-You know what, the other day I was in this museum.
And you know what I found out?
-What?
-The first ever woman was named Lucy.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: It's a very funky plot.
-Is that supposed to make me feel better?
-Yeah.
No.
[END PLAYBACK]
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: So this movie
had been out for quite some time.
And I was at a dinner party in Santa Monica.
And someone said have you seen the movie "Lucy?"
And I said, no.
And they said, you know, it's about your Lucy.
And I couldn't believe it, but there it was.
So as you heard, Lucy is not alone.
Funny, a number of years ago I was on an airplane
and talking to one of those people
you can't stop talking to.
He's going to talk to you whether you like it or not.
And he said, well, did you ever find anything else?
So it was good question.
So we now have an extraordinary insight
into the anatomy of virtually every anatomical region.
And trying now to look at micro-evolutionary
changes over time.
It seems to have been a very stable species that underwent
very little change, perhaps a slight increase
in body size over time, but a very stable species.
And is the reference collection, the go-to collection,
for all paleoanthropologists who make discoveries now.
The first place they go is to the drawers
where Lucy and the other fossil from Hadar and the Afarensis
fossils are stored in Addis Ababa.
We know an enormous amount about this genus.
We belong in the genus Homo, which is Latin for man,
as you know.
Yet we know much, much more about the ape-men,
or Australopithecus, and the diversity of species,
the specializations in anatomy and behavior and diet,
than we know about the origins of our own genus.
And most recently we have begun to concentrate in areas where
we're finding sediments that are between two million and three
million.
Lucy's species, is I said, Afarensis,
disappeared at three million years, which
was a very eventful moment in human evolution,
and an eventful moment in terms of climatic change.
Because at the three million year timeline, time level,
there was this major shift from a wetter,
more forested environment, to a dryer, more open environment.
And we saw lots of diversifications
in animals that we think of traditionally
as savanna animals, like baboons speciated
into a number of species.
Like the great diversity of antelopes and gazelles
that make a living out in these open areas.
And it is generally thought that these earlier Australopithecus,
like Lucy, lived in more bushy or more woodland,
not deeply thick forested rainforest.
But certainly an environment was different.
And at that time, one of the great generators of change,
biological change with natural selection working,
is climatic change.
So what happened was there was a major change, that's
when Lucy's species disappears.
We see a whole proliferation of different kinds of vertebrates
living in open areas.
And we see a major bifurcation in the human family
tree between our own genus, Homo,
which has emphasized brain expansion,
and an increased diversity of Australopithecus species
that are now beginning to occupy a whole new set
of ecological niches, as I will show you.
So the switch has turned more to the origin
of man, the origin of Homo, which a "New Yorker" cartoon so
neatly pointed out.
Oh yeah, well, what if I were the first man on earth?
And there have been some recent discoveries.
I'm happy to say that part of that, part of those,
were made by my team.
This is a upper jaw.
This is the roof of your mouth, right here, your palate.
And you can see from the top that a chimp
and Australopithecus have very long, from front to back,
narrow, parallel side of tooth rows.
That's a feature we inherited from our ape ancestry.
But our own species, everybody sitting
in this room, Homo sapiens, we have a much more parabolic arch
to our arch.
It is very deep.
If you put your tongue in the top your mouth,
it's very domed.
Australopithecus and chimps have a very shallow palate
from the bottom of the teeth to the roof of the mouth.
And you can see how ours is wider from side to side,
shorter from front to back.
And this is a 2.4 million-year-old upper jaw
that was found at the side of Hadar
in much earlier deposits, more recent deposits.
And was, for a long time, the oldest anatomical evidence
that we have of our own genus, not very much.
Yet it was associated, interestingly,
with stone tools.
Tools, this doesn't probably look like very much to you,
some of us have stones in our driveways that look like that.
But there are features of that, such as this flat platform
up here where it was really struck,
this sort of bulb of percussion here as the shockwaves
go through the rock.
And they're found in an area where it's very fine grained.
So someone had to have purposely brought in that raw material
and made the tools there.
And that's the oldest association
between our own species and our unique mode of adaptation,
which is culture.
Now most recently, a group from the Institute of Human Origins
went off to a site up here in the corner,
called Ledi-Geraru, which is not far from the Hadar star there,
where Lucy was found.
And began looking at deposits that I explored in 1972
that were not very fossil rich.
But I collected enough pigs and elephant fossils from there
to know that this was around somewhere between two
and a half to three million years.
Pig fossils and elephant fossils are very time diagnostic.
For instance, if we all go out this weekend
and collect a dinosaur tooth, you
know that rock is older than 65 million years, right?
Well, elephants and pigs evolve very quickly over time.
And you can use them as time diagnostics.
So a colleague of mine, Kay Reed, at the Institute,
went out, got a permit to work there.
And her team announced, you may remember this spring,
the discovery of what is the oldest
evidence for our own genus.
Again, it's fragmentary, unfortunately.
We have a fragmented mandible on the right
there, from the top of that hill.
It was discovered by one of our Ethiopian students.
Very interesting developments in Ethiopia.
When we first went there, there was no lab.
There were no people interested in the subject.
Today, there's a major commitment
by the Ethiopian ministry of culture
that has built a fabulous lab.
There are now about 10 well-trained students
by our team and a couple of other teams
who are Ethiopian nationals, who are beginning
to undertake their own explorations,
put their own teams together, and make their own discoveries.
And appropriately, this lower jaw
was discovered by one of our Ethiopian students.
And there are features of this, such as
the long, narrow molars, for example,
and many other features in that jaw, that
suggest that this is the earliest
Homo at 2.8 million years.
Now it is most interesting for me
because when I announced Lucy in 1978, right
on the heels of that, I published a major overview
in "Science."
And suggested the possibility that Lucy's species, Afarensis,
is a generalized species, meaning it was not very
specialized in any direction.
It could be the common ancestor for our own lineage,
as well as other lineages of Australopithecus.
And this helps bolster that view.
Ethiopia has played an incredibly important role,
mainly because of geology.
But now because there are so many teams going there.
When I found Lucy in 1974, actually the year
before I found a fossil knee, no one
had found a human fossil in that region of the Afar Triangle,
that's 600 miles on the side.
And that led to sort of a hominid rush,
like the discovery of gold in California.
And other teams, who became competing teams,
went out there and started searching.
And the record in Ethiopia ranges
from about 5.8 million years ago, right
on up to the emergence of Homo sapiens at 200,000 years.
So it is an extraordinarily important and complete role.
Well, you may have all heard that the new governor
of Kentucky, who's been elected as a creationist, so
obviously these guys are going to the Creation
Museum in Kentucky.
But this is the photograph or the depiction we all
see so often every month or so, "New Yorker"
has some form of this.
And it's an inexorable march from,
as I say, ape to angel, because we all think of ourselves
as being such angels.
But even Darwin knew that there is no direct line from ape
to human, that the evolution of all creatures,
whether they be plants, insects, invertebrates, humans,
or whatever, is basically a tree.
And he drew a tree in his origin in 1859.
And that is, indeed, the case.
This is kind of my version of the family tree.
Everybody in my field has their own version,
so there's a veritable forest out there.
But what I want to point out here
is here is Lucy's species, dying out
at about three million years, and living for about
a million years of time.
We know her ancestor at about 4.2 million,
there's no question about that.
And we know something about her descendants
based on anatomy, this lineage and these two lineages.
And this is the first time we've been able to actually trace
lineages in the fossil record.
This was a group of Australopithecus
that were devout vegetarians.
They had massive faces, huge molars, big crests,
massive chewing muscles, like the temporalis and masseter
muscles.
And they specialized.
And as the climate got drier and drier in East Africa,
and as the antelopes and gazelles and savanna baboons
and other forms of animals, came into competition,
they ultimately went extinct.
They did not leave descendents.
So that part of the hypothesis that I've
published in '81, which has been fairly well established
with intermediate forms between Afarensis
and their very derived forms.
And it's only just recently, now,
that we've been able to begin to fill
in this branch leading to Homo.
So it's a hypothesis.
It continues to be strengthened by discoveries.
And what it does is it really puts Lucy's species, Afarensis,
at a pivotal point on the human family tree.
Where we had a fairly impoverished family tree here,
to a very species-rich tree.
Many of those species went extinct.
Neanderthals disappearing about 40,000 years ago,
about 5,000 years after we entered Europe.
And some other species that went extinct.
So Lucy's particular place on the family tree
is very important in terms of understanding
the dynamics of evolutionary change,
and ultimately the emergence of all of us in this room,
Homo sapiens, about 200,000 years ago or so.
So this was one of those moments-- oops, sorry--
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: I had a little nervous finger there.
In that movie, 'Lucy."
She actually goes back and meets her.
Very funky.
But we all know where this came from, This image right here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: So, that is more or less the story of Lucy
and her discovery, her importance.
Important role she's played in my life, of course,
as an anthropologist.
And this is my email if anybody wants to be in touch with me.
I have a website called becominghuman.org.
Because I think in many ways we're not there yet.
We're just becoming human.
And I just released, 14th of October, a MOOC on edx.org,
that is entitled "Human Origins."
It's eight weeks of lectures about-- I
guess there are about six or seven lectures a week.
They are about 15 minutes long.
Illustrated.
I had been asked by Coursera to do a course online.
And I really wanted to do a course that was free.
I wanted people to have total access to this, particularly
because of the third world countries in which I work,
where they will never have an opportunity, many
of these people, to take a course in human evolution
or human origins.
And my Ethiopian colleagues have already
written me, some of the people working in the National
Museum, who have really no formal education
in human evolution.
They are all glued to their screen, because in this course,
they learn what otherwise they would not
have available because this course is absolutely free.
You have to enroll at a certain time.
And if you want credit, it's like $400.
There are 10,000 students now taking this course.
It was the first time it was offered.
It will be offered again next March.
But these are additional resources
if you would like to follow up with anything.
And of course, I'm available on email.
Thanks very much, indeed.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: Any questions for our talk?
Yes?
MALE SPEAKER: So you described Lucy
between around four to three million years ago.
Were there any other human species or humanoid species
at that time?
In your diagram there weren't any.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: The question is,
were there other species of humans
living at the same time as Australopithecus, Afarensis,
or Lucy's species.
This is a question that we are debating at the moment.
An Ethiopian colleague of mine found
at about 3.4 million years, which
means a couple hundred thousand years older than Lucy,
north of where I work, a very interesting foot skeleton
and partial limb skeleton that has a divergent toe.
And that-- Lucy's toe, or Afarensis,
we have a complete articulated foot that we found one year.
And those feet are like our feet.
You saw the footprints and so on.
So he thinks that's a new species.
He hasn't named it a new species right now,
but I know in private conversation with him
that he is on the verge of putting together
an argument that it is another species.
That would probably be a species that
is a descendant of Ardipithecus, which I haven't talked about,
which is at 4.4 million.
And while-- and it has a very large divergent toe.
So there may be two lineages there.
There is a discovery by the Leakey family
on the west side of Lake Turkana, which they have
given a new species name to.
And most people don't think it's probably a new species.
But that may be another lineage.
I think it would be very unusual if Afarensis
were the only species.
Even up as recently as 50,000 years ago on planet Earth,
we had Homo neanderthalensis.
We had Homo sapiens.
We had Homo erectus, very late Homo erectus in Java.
We had Homo floresiensis, these peculiar little hobbit-like
creatures that are found out in the end of the Malay
Archipelago.
And perhaps these denisovans that have been
recognized in genetic analyses.
So at just about every point you had
three or four or five species.
But then there was a major winnowing of those species.
And that is directly correlated, really, with our emergence.
Wherever Homo sapiens went, whatever species was there
as a human species, very rapidly disappeared.
And there is an interesting article by one of my colleagues
at the Institute of Human Origin, Curtis Marion,
in the September issue, the cover issue of the "Scientific
American" in September, called "How
Humans Conquered the Planet."
And in there he makes a case that the refinement
of the features that we really consider
as modern human, symbolic language, cumulative culture,
and significant cooperation, division of labor, and so on,
really emerged in Africa, in that very diverse, mosaic set
of environments.
Neanderthals had evolved into a separate species in Europe
directly in response to two things.
One was genetic isolation, so there
was recombination, and mutation, and natural selection.
But also a physical, physiological, and anatomical
adaptations to a periglacial environment.
They were living with glaciers in the distance, three, four
miles thick.
And their anatomy shows that.
But he thinks that the things that really make us who we are
today came out of Africa, which alters dramatically,
and I've said this for years, the early view we see
in "Time-Life" books on early man of this upright,
white skin, French looking guy in Europe, as the first humans.
Whereas, I think it was probably a much darker skinned people
who came out of Europe and displaced Neanderthals.
Brought about the extinction of flores, floresiensis,
erectus, and so on.
So I'd be very surprised if there were not
other lineages or other species at the same time.
MALE SPEAKER: If I am remembering correctly,
you said that Afarensis lived to about three million years ago
and the earliest Homo species was 2.8 million.
What is it that distinguishes Homo from Australopithecus
that you can say, now we've got a new genus?
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: Well, I showed you the mandible.
And there are a number of features in there,
the shape, the elongation of the teeth,
the reduction of buttressing of the anterior
portion of the mandible, the particular place where
the, what's called, the ascending ramus arises,
and the shape of the arch in a parabolic fashion.
We don't know exactly why those came about.
We think it had something to do with more
flexion of the cranial basal areas of the skull that
brought this face in and shortened the arch.
And in relation to that, it began to broaden.
But there are lots of people working on that
trying to figure that out.
It isn't just the stone tools that are found with them,
because that doesn't define a species.
And the upper jaw I showed you, I think,
was very convincingly different from an Australopithecus.
So what we would like to see, of course,
are cranial remains to see if there's much difference in not
only cranial capacity, but cranial
shape between Australopithecus.
Now the palate, if we look at it in lateral view,
is not prognathic or projecting.
It's very flat like ours.
Our faces are very flat.
So there are those subtle features
that all line up and accumulate to convince us
that that Homo is very different from Australopithecus.
Does that answer your question?
MALE SPEAKER: One more.
MALE SPEAKER: So you mentioned that most
of the fossils of Lucy's species are kept in the National
Museum in Ethiopia.
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: All of the specimens.
All of the specimens that have been found in Ethiopia
of human ancestors now reside in the National Museum
in Addis Ababa, yes.
MALE SPEAKER: So, given what's happening, like in Syria
and so on, are you worried that someday somebody may steal them
or-- or what are we doing to protect them?
DR. DONALD JOHANSON: Well, I'm more worried
that there's going to be a massive earthquake.
As you get earthquakes, you know the Rift Valley
is very unstable like California and the Western coast
and the Ring of Fire.
They are stored in very substantial safes.
There are guards at the museum all the time.
There is a trained group of Ethiopian scholars now,
who are totally dedicated to this.
Some of them are in still Ethiopia teaching or working
full time at the ministry.
But of course, we never know.
I think there is no anti-evolution movement
in Ethiopia like there has been in Kenya because
of these radical Baptists who have been going over
there and converting everybody to Christianity
and saying that this evidence needs to be destroyed,
sort of like the ISIS point of view.
It would be very difficult for anyone to steal these.
It would be very difficult for anybody
to come in and destroy them.
But we never know what happens.
In 1940-- when was Pearl Harbor?
Was that '41?
All the Homo erectus, all the Peking Man fossils,
were shipped from Peking to the China Sea, South China Sea,
to save them from the invasion.
And they vanished.
They've never been found.
They never made it aboard the USS Harrison.
So things like that happen.
Yet on the other hand, you have the first Neanderthal
found in 1856 in the Neander Valley, Neanderthal,
near Dusseldorf.
And that survived and still is in Dusseldorf,
because it was kept in a safe.
And was the first fossil Neanderthal,
the first fossil human ever found in Europe.
But in addition to that, it was the first fossil specimen
that gave us DNA.
They drilled into the arm bone of this 1856 Neanderthal,
that nobody even knew about genes back then.
Fortunately preserved.
Fortunately organic material in it.
And fortunately getting a DNA sequence out of it.
So it works both ways.
But I firmly believe that these fossils belong
in the country of discovery, and that it's incumbent on us
as scholars, coming in at their invitation,
having this privileged opportunity to come in,
to help them establish these organizations
like a major laboratory, like the National Museum,
to house these specimens.
And let's hope they do continue to survive.
Maybe someday someone will develop a method
to actually date the fossil and not the volcanic ash,
for example.
That would be a significant contribution.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you very much for speaking
with us today.
We'll have time for a book signing afterwards.
So thank you for stopping by.