Science / Medicine : SEARCHING FOR OUR Human Origins

On a hot Ethiopian plain in November, 1974, a group of paleoanthropologists dug up the fossilized bones of a 4-foot-tall female primate and pronounced her the oldest ancestor of the human race.

That night Donald C. Johanson and his fellow scientists celebrated with beer and music. Someone in the camp had a tape of the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” and played it over and over again.

The song gave the 3-million-year-old, apelike fossil a name:”Lucy.” She, in turn, helped make a name for her discoverer. In a scientific field where lucky finds bring fame, Johanson rapidly emerged as a challenger to the Leakey family and other world-renowned paleoanthropologists.

But it was another find 12 years later that may hold evolutionary implications at least as great as those of Lucy’s.

In July, 1986, Johanson led an expedition to Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, which the Leakeys had made famous decades before with a series of fossil finds.

During a late afternoon walk on the third day of the expedition, a member of Johanson’s team happened to see a bit of elbow bone sticking out of the sands of the Serengeti plain. Johanson spotted part of an upper arm bone lying not far away.

That week, the team dug up 302 pieces of fossilized bone and teeth and judged them all to be fragments of the same hominid--as the family of primates that includes humans is called.

The skeleton, also that of a female, dated back about half as far as Lucy. It had a brain almost the size of a human’s but a body much like an ape’s, Johanson determined. This astonished paleoanthropologists the world over, who had thought that by about 1.8 million years ago our ancestors were well on the way toward developing humanlike bodies. Dubbed “OH (Olduvai hominid) 62,” Johanson’s more recent “lucky find” has since challenged the accepted course of human evolution, just as Lucy helped mark its beginning.

All of which is not to say that Johanson has gotten by on luck alone. Johanson’s colleagues and scientific rivals alike speak of his indefatigable spirit and keen intelligence, qualities they say are as much in evidence at the unusual Berkeley research facility he founded and now directs as they excavate sites half a world away.

The facility, the Institute of Human Origins, occupies two floors of a stucco-and-glass building on a hill just north of the University of California campus. Johanson’s staff includes seven full-time paleoanthropologists and more than a dozen associates and researchers.

In addition to providing office space for scholars in residence, the institute functions as a data source for scientists worldwide. At a special laboratory in the building, geologists determine the age of rocks found near fossils; in another laboratory, workers make casts of delicate fossils to be used in the reconstruction of prehistoric skeletons.

It is the only facility of its kind in the world, institute staffers say. Paleoanthropologists usually affiliate with universities or museums--or in some countries, with the government. In contrast, the Institute of Human Origins operates as an independent, private foundation that does its own research.

“You might call it a human evolutionary think tank,” Johanson said in an interview at his office, whose large windows look out on the Berkeley hills. The bookshelves and walls display stone tools, reproductions of cave drawings and other artifacts: reminders that the particular experiment known as Western civilization is but a recent design.

“The institute is an exceptional example of what paleoanthropologists are and what we do: research, discovery, interpretation, and publication,” Johanson said. “It is a place where scholars can devote full time to research and not have to worry about teaching and (administrative) duties.”

The promise of academic independence has lured untenured young scientists from universities. Others have come from museum jobs, like Johanson himself, who said he decided to establish the institute when he was the curator of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and “beginning to think about the next stage in my career.”

Independence has not come easy, however. When Johanson founded it in 1981, the institute comprised a few desks crowded into 300 square feet of a Berkeley church basement. At first, he worked there alone.

Even now that the institute has moved into 5,200 feet of prime office space and houses state-of-the-art dating and measuring equipment, Johanson admitted that sustaining a $1-million annual budget requires “considerable effort.”

So these days when he is not looking for fossils, the 45-year-old director of the Institute of Human Origins travels the world lecturing and scouting for funds. He conducts an annual black-tie fund raiser in New York City. Donors to the institute have included Ann and Gordon Getty and Apple Computer Inc. The National Science Foundation has supported institute scientists with research grants.

But these administrative functions never obscure the real work of anthropology or the fierce, sometimes highly personal competition among the top research groups.

Perhaps because paleoanthropology ultimately implicates all humanity as a family, scientific disputes in the field occasionally take on the characteristics of sibing rivalry. One commentator has observed that anthropologists meeting to discuss fossilized bones sometimes seem more likely to hurl them at one another. But even those who dispute some of Johanson’s conclusions praise his talents as a scientist and his work in establishing the institute.

William Jungers of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has accepted Lucy as an ancestor but has argued against Johanson’s claim that she walked upright.

Most paleontologists agree that bipedality--not brain size--was the first characteristic that truly distinguished pre-human creatures from apes, and whether Lucy walked has been a hot issue in paleoanthropology, according to both Jungers and Johanson.

“We argue about fairly arcane things, but I think everybody would agree that what (the Institute for Human Origins) does is very important for the study of human evolution,” Jungers said.

And even the Louis S. B. Leakey Foundation of Pasadena--named for the late paleoanthropologist whose wife, Mary, and son, Richard, have rejected Johanson’s central theory that Lucy is our earliest ancestor--has awarded grant money to scientists at Johanson’s institute in the past.

The Leakeys believe that an even older, undiscovered species gave rise to human beings, and that Lucy was part of a line that eventually died out--an idea that Johanson called “more of a dream than a true hypothesis.”

At the institute, world-class scientists are able to devote all of their time to the resolution of such questions. “I enjoy the fact that I’m not harassed by students here,” said Yoel Rak, an expert on hominid facial structure. Rak is spending a year at the institute on sabbatical from Tel Aviv University.

“The greatest thing are the conversations I have with colleagues here, on the sofa, relaxed,” Rak said. “What more can you ask?”

Downstairs from the institute’s offices, thousands of fossilized bones lie in lockers labeled with the names of African expedition sites. OH 62 lives there now, on loan from the Tanzanian government.

In another room, a state-of-the-art, computerized potassium-argon dating machine hums, calculating the age of volcanic rocks found near fossils.

But many of the institute’s projects are not immediately apparent from a tour of the building. The institute conducts an ambitious outreach program aimed at training Africans to initiate paleoanthropological studies on their own. Each year, the institute invites several African students to study at Berkeley, sponsoring both classroom and field work.

The institute also sponsors lectures and symposiums for the lay and professional public. “It is my belief that in doing so we help eradicate some of the ignorance that leads to things like creationism,” said William Kimbel, a former graduate student of Johanson’s who now holds the title of president of the institute.

The institute has held talks on pre-human locomotion, sexuality and other topics, and Johanson occasionally teaches undergraduate courses at the University of California.

“I find a tremendous receptivity among the public for the subject matter of ‘where did we come from and how did we get here?’ ” Johanson said. “People are thirsty and hungry for information on our origins. I feel a responsibility as a major figure in the area . . . to convey to the public the knowledge of human origins in a way that is understandable to them.” Ironically, it was the work of Louis Leakey that first attracted Johanson to anthropology. When he was 16, he read that Leakey had begun pulling human fossils out of the African soil.

“His discoveries were very attractive, thought-provoking,” Johanson said. “This is what I wanted to do. I wanted to go to Africa and find fossils, even though I knew the possibility, the chance, of this happening was miniscule.”

But as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, and then as a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, Johanson said, he devoted all his energies to “gearing myself up to go to Africa.”

Next summer Johanson will return to Olduvai. The discovery of OH 62 has provoked new questions, he said. It is the first reasonably complete skeleton of Homo habilis, or “tool-using man,” a species first identified by Louis Leakey.

But OH 62’s long, apelike arms have puzzled scientists. “If OH 62 has relatively long arms like Lucy, 1.5 million years later than Lucy, for what reason did natural selection keep these arms long?” Johanson asked. “That is a major behavioral question we are asking ourselves now. . . . We are not only interested in what these hominids look like, but also how they were interacting with their environment.”

Will the next expedition provide OH 62 with a more affectionate name, like that of her predecessor Lucy?

Johanson smiled. “I’ve got to upgrade these expeditions and get some new tapes,” he said.