Donald Johanson Interview (page: 8 / 9) Discoverer of Lucy	Print Interview

Why did the brain develop, if not for the reason that we all thought for so long?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Donald Johanson: We're getting into an area of what questions are remaining in terms of human evolution and there are so many. One of the most important ones is "Why did the brain expand?" If it wasn't associated with stone tool manufacture, if it wasn't to make better stone tools, why did it expand? What were the selective forces in an evolutionary perspective that selected for individuals with larger brains? There is a suggestion by primatologists, people who are studying primate societies that intelligence is a very important element of social behavior and social interaction. Those creatures that live in more complex societies, like the primates for example, monkeys, and particularly apes like chimps and gorillas, are fairly intelligent. Not because they are making and using tools, but because they live in a society where there is a complex set of relationships. There is a web of interconnectedness between individuals in a society that demands a high level of intelligence. There is a suggestion that the social milieu in which our ancestors evolved was a fairly complex one. This is one of the interpretations which has been suggested for why our ancestors became upright. They became upright because of increasing complexity in their social and physical world. There developed a whole series of relationships that were centered around the human family, in fact. Lucy may represent the first step in the evolution of the human family. The human family is a very important aspect of our adaptation. And what helps solidify that is intelligence. So that, while Lucy didn't have a brain much bigger than that of a chimpanzee, it probably was wired somewhat differently, and was probably relatively more intelligent than that of a chimpanzee. And that was because of the sort of social life that she lived.

You seem to be implying that human psychology has been terribly important, even 3.5 million years ago.

Donald Johanson: Well, what we have found, subsequent to Lucy, at the site of Hadar, was a remarkable collection of over two hundred bone specimens at one fossil site. Of adults, males and females, big ones and small ones, individuals as young as two years old. A child's skull of about four years old. Which suggests that even back then, our ancestors had to have been living in groups. Look at the size of Lucy. She was only three and one-half feet tall at the most. Very short individual, very small in size. She would not have been able to live out on the savannas by herself, without the support of a larger group. So I think there is some evidence in the fossil record also, that our ancestors were living in groups and not living as individuals or just in pairs.

Has that way of looking at things also provoked controversy in your field?

Donald Johanson: There is very little we say in our field that doesn't provoke controversy. I gave a lecture a number of years ago at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and it was entitled "Human Origins: 3.5 Million Years of Controversy." Because every time something new is announced in the field of anthropology, it goes through a period of controversy and conflict. Much of what I published in the late 1970s precipitated tremendous controversy. There were groups who felt that there were two different kinds of hominids at the time of Lucy, rather than one, as we suggested. That has generated enormous literature. There are some people who believe that Afarensis, the species to which Lucy belongs, was not yet fully terrestrial, and bipedal, that there are certain aspects of her anatomy, like the fairly long arms, that suggested that they were still climbing in the trees. Others say "No, absolutely not. They were wholly out of the trees. They were fully committed to terrestrial bipedal locomotion." There are two major groups which have developed. Some of those individuals don't even talk to one another, except in the scientific literature. So she has precipitated tremendous controversy about her origins.

You discovered Lucy in 1974. It is now 1991. What are the challenges ahead for you? What are you dying to get your hands on next?

Donald Johanson: There are two major areas which interest me the most. One of them is between two and three millions years. This is a period of time for which we have very few fossils. We have a few specimens from East Africa. We have some from South Africa. People often talk about the missing link. Every time you find one of these fossils, it's another link in the chain, because the chain of evolution is a long and continuous one, so each one could be called the missing link. The link between Lucy and the ones which we think are our direct ancestors is still missing. Homo habilis, or the handyman, as he is called, was making stone tools two million years ago, and had brains twice the size of Lucy's. It's very provocative to think that Lucy existed, as a species, unchanged for a million years. What stimulated that species to change? What were the climatic, environmental pressures on that species to change, and for that change to generate a tool-using, culture-bound animal. We depend totally on culture for our survival. Without culture, we wouldn't make it. Picture yourself totally stripped of your clothes, out on the grasslands of East Africa. How would you even survive a week, without something as simple as Swiss army knife? What was it that provoked that change from a non-tool making, small-brained form, to a larger brain, stone tool-making form. And that's a mystery. That's still one of the most exciting periods in the human career that is as yet unsolved.

The other one is what preceded Lucy? We can go back pretty well to about four million years. At four million years, we have bits of jaws, bits of skulls, bits of leg bones, which are virtually identical to those of Lucy. So her species went back to about four million years. Beyond that, once we dig deeper into the fossil records, we have a few molars, a little scrap of jaw, but nothing that tells us what caused the apes to go in one direction, and the humans to go in another. We know from genetic studies that humans and modern African apes are so closely related to one another, that they share 99 percent identity in their DNA. If you were to take that strand of DNA out of you or me, and stretch it out, and put next to it the DNA of the chimpanzee, there would be one percent difference. Yet look at the enormous differences there are between chimps and us. That means we must be evolutionarily closely related to the apes. That means the separation between the apes and the humans probably happened as recently as five or six million years ago. Not like people have wanted, Say 15 to 20 years ago, people believed that separation was 20 million years ago. We were comfortably separated from these "beasts." Now we find out that they are very closely related to us. They are cousins in the true sense of the word cousins. They are remarkably close to us. The work that Jane Goodall and others have done on chimps in the wild shows that there are many behaviors which chimps have that forecast what we think of as human.

This leads to a consideration of things like, "If they are that closely related to us, how can we keep them in tiny little cages for experiments? They must have some of the same emotions which we have." Lucy has been important in all of this, because she has sometimes been called the ape that stood up. Here was a creature which still has in her anatomy certain evolutionary baggage which is left over from her four-legged, quadrupedal ancestors. But yet, she made that crucial step towards what it means to be human.

I find it ironic, walking in the Institute of Human Origins, that this is connected to a Christian organization. Obviously, what you have spent your life studying, is in direct contradiction to some religious view of human origins. Do you have any interaction with religious groups?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Donald Johanson: We are housed here, in Berkeley, in space which we rent from a church's divinity school, which is an Episcopalian seminary. There really is very little interaction between their staff and our staff. We are really dealing with two different views of understanding our origins. One, as I said, is based on faith. It's really based on what you believe in. That's something that science should never invade. In other words, we should never take a person's faith and subject it to scientific inquiry. You never set up a hypothesis which says: Jesus was the son of God, true or false. There isn't a true or false about it. You either believe it or you don't. And you don't take the scientific evidence and subject it to religious questions. We don't ask the question, is gravity moral? Gravity is a fact, it's a law. Everyone can accept that. I think that while there are, of course, conflicts and differences between the two, they deal with totally different philosophies and perspectives on how we understand the physical world around us. There are many people I know, and I'm sure you do, who are religious, who do believe in a divine creator, someone who has designed all of this, and that one aspect of that design was evolution. There is no conflict in their mind. Evolution can be accepted as a scientific fact and part of the whole glory of creation.

Do you think you could have been as successful a chemist as you are an anthropologist? Were you born an anthropologist? I think you know what I'm getting at. A Los Angeles Times columnist, Jack Smith, once posed this question to Itzhak Perlman. If he had just happened to pick up the trombone instead of the violin, would he be the world's greatest trombone player? Perlman couldn't answer it. I wonder what your thoughts are.

Donald Johanson: It's an extraordinarily difficult question. I believe I have been successful in my own scientific arena, partly because of the passion which I brought to it and the dedication I brought to it. But on the other hand, being in the right place at the right time, with the right preparation, is also important. In 1971, when I was working in Ethiopia, I met a French geologist. He was looking for an anthropologist to work with him in the northern part of Ethiopia, in an area which is very rich in fossil sites. So I was in the right place, I was there at the right time, and I had the right preparation. I seized that opportunity. I have no idea whether or not the right place and the right time would have been there had I been a chemist. The passion, the drive, the ability, the sensitivity, the hope, the wish, the desire, all of those things that are important would have certainly been a part of me. So I think you can make a prediction based on that, and say, yes, I would have been successful. Whether I would have been as successful as a chemist as I am as an anthropologist, is difficult to say.

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