Donald C. Johanson > Quotes

“To probe our past beyond afarensis was to fall into a wormhole— and emerge on the other side 9 million years earlier, in the Miocene epoch.”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

“The brain is the hungriest organ in the body, with a metabolic rate sixteen times that of muscle tissue per unit weight. In modern humans, it accounts for 20 to 25 percent of an adult’s energy needs.”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

“Incidentally because the gastrointestinal track is metabolically greedy any reduction in its size would have freed up energy for other demands, such as those of a bigger brain.”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

“Today only a handful of apes survive— the orangutan and gibbon in Asia, and the chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla in Africa— and most of them are hanging in the balance, thanks to human pressures. During the Miocene, however, as many as one hundred ape species flourished throughout the Old World. One of these gave rise to the human lineage.”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

“Like Orrorin, Ard. kadabba has been held up as an early biped. However, the hypothesis that Ard. kadabba traveled on two legs hinges on a single left foot phalanx, or toe bone, that has been consigned to this species. The bone’s joint tilts upward like a human’s rather than downward like a chimp’s— a configuration that enables humans to “toe off” when walking.”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

“The renowned Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once remarked, “All species are unique,”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

“East Africa, with its natural rock exposures and relatively tolerable climate, has long been the preferred hunting ground of paleoanthropologists. Few have dared venture beyond that comfort zone.”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins

“Should further discoveries bear this out, the robust australopithecines will stand as a rare example of parallel evolution, in which members of two descendant lineages of A. afarensis independently evolved similar adaptations, presumably in response to environmental change.”
― Donald C. Johanson, Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins