Lucy talk

Tuesday night, some colleagues and I attended a fascinating talk at the Linda Hall Library by Dr. Donald Johanson (presentation pictured above), the Founding Director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.  Dr. Johanson discovered the most famous fossil in the world, "Lucy," and thereby gained worldwide recognition as a paleoanthropologist (he made certain that we understood that paleoanthropology is in fact NOT the study of old anthropologists).  The event space was packed and we all listened intently as he described the day on which he uncovered Lucy's remains in the Tanzanian desert (November 24th, 1974, incidentally 115 years to the day after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection), and the implications of that finding.  The species to which Lucy belongs, Australopithecus afarensis, is a member of the lineage that split from the other Great Apes (like the orangutan, pictured above with my niece) and gave rise to modern humans.