Enjoy lunch with paleoanthropologist Don Johanson in Santa Monica or San Francisco.
Many consider Johanson 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. Although the 20th century has been peppered with important fossil hominid finds from both eastern and southern Africa, it was Dr. Johanson’s 1974 discovery of a 3.2-million-year-old hominid fossil in Ethiopia that added a crucial link.
Lucy, as the skeleton was called, prompted on-going debate and major revisions in our knowledge and understanding of the human evolutionary past. The skeleton possessed an intriguing mixture of ape-like features such as a projecting face and small brain, but also characters we consider human such as upright walking. Lucy continues to be a diadem in the crown of hominid fossils and serves as an important touchstone for all subsequent discoveries.
In the 37 years since Johanson earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he has led field explorations in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the Middle East, and effectively reached across multiple media platforms—hosting and narrating the Emmy nominated PBS/NOVA series In Search of Human Origins, co- authoring nine books, and lecturing at universities, corporations, and public forums—to share his findings and stimulate healthy debate. Driven by a notion that we cannot fully grasp who we are and where we are headed as a species until we have a more complete knowledge of our evolutionary roots, Johanson founded the Institute of Human Origins, a human-evolution think tank.
He is an honorary board member of the Explorers Club, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a distinguished member of the Siena Academy of Sciences in Italy. He also serves as the Virginia M. Ullman Chair in Human Origins at Arizona State University, where he teaches.
Understanding who we are is not just a matter of idle curiosity. It is a matter of survival for our own species as well as for the millions of other species with whom we share the Earth. ---Donald Johanson.