Donald Johanson Quotes
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I realized immediately that this was a terribly important discovery, but I didn't realize how important it would be until we had spent a lot of time in the laboratory studying it.
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I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction.
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It's very hard for all of us, when we've committed ourselves to a particular interpretation, to change our minds.
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We are placed in the genus of Homo, which is Latin for man - Homo sapiens: supposedly wise men. I sometimes think - wonder - whether we really are wise men.
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I was very intellectually oriented, very early on.
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Commitment, belief and positive attitude are all important if you're going to be a success, whether you're in sports, in business or, as in my case, anthropology.
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When we look for the origins of all humanity today, let's not just look at Europe, because I think Africa was the cradle, the crucible that created us as Homo sapiens.
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As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to go on a number of archeological digs. So I had experience excavating, digging up remains of ancient Indian villages in the Midwest and in the Southwest.
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Regardless of what we look like on the outside, genetically, on the inside, everyone is an African.
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Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.
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I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I'll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.
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But what really excited me was the idea that humans had a tremendous pre-history that went back millions of years. I wanted to go to Africa to find some of these creatures.
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Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution.
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Scientists are very afraid of being proven wrong.
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In our case, finding a Lucy is unique. No one will ever find another Lucy. You can't order one from a biological supply house. It's a unique discovery, a unique specimen.
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When I realized, in 1978, that Lucy did represent a new species of human ancestor, and that I had an opportunity to name this new species, I realized this was a revolutionary step in understanding human origins.
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And what I wanted to do was, I wanted to explore problems and areas where we didn't have answers. In fact, where we didn't even know the right questions to ask.
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The right question to ask from a Darwinian prospective is what was it about bipedalism that was so advantageous? Why did it lead to a - why did that adaptation ultimately lead to a species Homo sapiens that has come to dominate the planet today with six and a half billion people?
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All mammals undergo a certain degree of diversification. Darwin knew that. When he drew a family tree, it had many branches on it.
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I find a tremendous receptivity among the public for the subject matter of, 'Where did we come from and how did we get here?' People are thirsty and hungry for information on our origins. I feel a responsibility as a major figure in the area... to convey to the public the knowledge of human origins in a way that is understandable to them.
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One has to take initiative in life to achieve what he or she wants.
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Most achievers I know are people who have made a strong and deep dedication to pursuing a particular goal. That dedication took a tremendous amount of effort.
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What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six million years. And we see that upright bipedal walking goes back that far in time.
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What makes us human depends on what place on our evolutionary path we're talking about. If you go back six million years ago, what makes us human is that we were walking upright. That's all. If you go to 2.6 million years ago, it's the fact that we're designing and making stone tools.