By Scott Longman
Measured down to the level of planaria, every living being loves the original Raiders of The Lost Ark movie.
But lest any youngster consider that movie to be a Career Day Guide, the reality of actually being an archeologist/anthropologist is completely, absurdly unrelated. And to be more precise, the three most prominent ways in which it is not at all related are: 1) The chances of you finding any single historic artifact of monumental consequence are asymptotically zero, 2) You won’t do any midnight grave robbing and 3) Nobody will want to kill you in the process.
Unless you are Don Johanson.
November, 1973. Afar region, Ethiopia. It was blisteringly hot, brutally arid, and devoid of nearly all vegetation, a limitless sea of barren hillocks and rocks. Johanson was on his first major field expedition, and he was beset with problems. He was on a tight budget, and expenses had already been far larger than anticipated. The Ethiopian bureaucracies that control everything were a labyrinthine mess. He had a limited amount of time in the field in which to discover something noteworthy, or else his young reputation might well be ended before it got started, and with it, future funding. And then, there was the threat of the local tribes.
The Afar tribesmen were leading life as their people had, almost unchanged, for millennia. They didn’t like outsiders in their lands: the central government had a history of being ratbastards to them, and they viewed all outsiders as spies and provocateurs. They arrived in the base camp with heads wrapped, carrying rifles, and they wanted the expedition gone. Not one of them believed for a flickering instant that all these people were there simply looking for rocks and bones. The idea itself was insane—you can’t eat, burn or trade with such things, and they are limitlessly available for free. Should those tribesmen have decided to go kinetic, well, the site was beyond remote, no central authority would ever probably investigate, and the Afar, as nomads, would be gone immediately.
Fortunately, Johanson knew how to read the circumstances, and through an interpreter, he offered gifts and more importantly, offered to host a couple of Afar observers in camp, so that they could see what the camp was up to. The Afar watchers eventually concluded that, yes, these nutjob foreigners actually were just after rocks and bones.
That matter addressed, Johanson remained under hard time pressure. Needing to clear his mind one afternoon, Johanson went for a solo walk. He was doing much more thinking than looking. And he idly kicked at what looked like a hippo rib.
It wasn’t.
He looked closer, and it dawned on him that it was a tibia, the upper part of a shinbone. And then he looked some more, and then a femur, a thighbone. And they fit together perfectly. That’s a lottery-shot chance. But then he hit the 50-state Powerball: there was a pretty good chance that this wasn’t a monkey, but rather a hominid—a human ancestor. If that proved true, it was career-changing, even history-changing.
There was one enormous problem.
The Ethiopian bureaucracy had a reputation for overbearing and illogical regulations and procedures. Here, those bureaucrats would let Johanson temporarily take his finds out of the country for study, but only if they were important enough. But, having zero understanding of the amount of review and analysis that such finds require, the bureaucrats insisted that Johanson hold a press conference with the substance of his finds before he even left the country.
That put him in a trick bag: if he didn’t do the press conference describing how important the finds were, he couldn’t take them. If he did do the press conference, but made statements that were later to be proven wrong, he’d just shot his young career right in the wedding tackle.
The overwhelming issue: Were these bones ape, or were they hominid?
He confided in his colleague Tom Gray: “I don’t trust my anatomy well enough to be absolutely sure. We need a human knee joint.”
Some rumination later, Johanson pulled Gray aside, and pointed in the distance. “There’s an Afar burial mound out there.”
Whoa. Gray looked at him like he’d started speaking in tongues, because Gray had no doubt at all that the Afar tribesmen would coldsmoke them all for touching it.
Well, they waited until dark and went grave-robbing anyway.
They got the femur, made the comparison, did the press conference, shocked the scientific world, got the hell out of Ethiopia for the season, gained lots of new funding, and launched a career.
But that’s not the best part. The best part came the following season. It really deserves its own article, but in short: Johanson went back, and found The Holy Grail of early hominids, in the form of the oldest—3.2 million years—most complete human ancestor skeleton to date, defining a new species, and in a chrono gap where there hadn’t been anything at all. This find was an M67 frag in the paleoanthropology punchbowl. The consequences for understanding how humans came to be were profound, and this discovery is widely recognized as among the most monumental scientific finds ever.
As you might imagine, the atmosphere in the camp that night was what appears to be over the top, with a rumor of all of certain camp supplies being depleted. And somebody putting the Beatles’ tune “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on loop. At some point that evening, they decided to name the find “Lucy.” It stuck.
“Lucy” became a household word. In 1979, TIME magazine went so far as to call her a “front page celebrity.”
When you add up the Afar armed threat, the burial mound robbing, and the grand slam historic find, Don Johanson actually did go the full Indiana Jones.
