Donald Johanson is the Founding Director of ASU's Institute of Human Origins. Many consider him to be among the most important and accomplished paleoanthropologists of our time. Over the course of his illustrious career he has produced some of the field’s groundbreaking discoveries, including the most widely known and thoroughly studied fossil find of the 20th century -- the Lucy skeleton.
Dr. Johanson's presentation will be a fascinating tour of the last three decades of study -- the most exciting period of paleoanthropologic investigation thus far. In that time, Johanson and his colleagues have uncovered a total of 363 specimens of Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s species, a transitional creature between apes and humans), spanning 400,000 years. As a result, we now have a unique fossil record of one branch of humanity's family tree -- a tree that is believed to date back a staggering 7 million years. Focusing on dramatic new fossil finds and breakthrough advances in DNA research, Johanson will provide the latest answers that post-Lucy paleoanthropologists are finding to questions such as: How did Homo sapiens evolve? When and where did our species originate? What separates hominids from the apes? What was the nature of Neanderthal and modern human encounters? What mysteries about human evolution remain to be solved?