Donald Johanson Quotes

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.

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.

Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.

I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.

I'd always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.

[Tim White] always spoke about his work in terms of forensics, as if he was investigating a crime scene. While we were there, they found the fossilized excrement of a lion that had turned into stone, and we would immediately start to concoct stories. Was it a lion that killed the early human? Of course, the lion could've been there three weeks later, or maybe 20,000 years earlier.

Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.

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.

Such discoveries have led me, and other geologists, to reconsider the evidence previously derived from caves brought forward in proof of the high antiquity of Man.

I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.

Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons.

I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils.

I went to start the first Ethiopian-led project in paleoanthropology, ever. Doing that was not easy.

My degrees are in anthropology, and I have friends who have worked with apes.

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.

No branches of historical inquiry have suffered more from fanciful speculation than those which relate to the origin and attributes of the races of mankind. The differentiation of these races began in prehistoric darkness, and the more obscure a subject is, so much the more fascinating. Hypotheses are tempting, because though it may be impossible to verify them, it is, in the paucity of data, almost equally impossible to refute them.

The number of known human fossils only increases slowly. But the manner of regarding and assessing them is capable of progressing rapidly, as indeed it does. In the absence of any absolutely sensational discovery in prehistory, there is an up-to-date and scientific manner of understanding man, which is solidly based on palaeontology.

I guess I just like the idea of digging things up. Although I used to be scared of human skeletons.

If my career doesn't work out as a violinist, I want to become an archaeologist. I've read about paleontology, too - that's dinosaur bones - but I thought it would be more interesting to do archaeology.

We were very, very lucky [with Tim White filmed making historic discoveries in the East African Rift ] . In 100 years, only three skeletal remains [of early man] were ever found at this site. This was the third one, and we were right there when it happened. In fact, when I first heard they had found something, I said, "Please stop it! Don't do anything right now. Let's do it tomorrow until we have unpacked our cameras and assembled our stuff.

When I was a kid the highlight of my week would be doing a fossil hunt at the local quarry... that kind of thing.

When out fossil hunting, it is very easy to forget that rather than telling you how the creatures lived, the remains you find indicate only where they became fossilized.

Man's Place in Nature.

I feel like I studied anthropology in college for a reason.

Biological anthropology tends to focus on skeletons because that's what is often left behind in the ground, but I am a whole-body anatomist, I'm a clinical anatomist and that's what I teach, I teach it all, not just the skeleton, the muscles and nerves, blood vessels.