First Fridays Science Discussion | Natural History Museum Of Los Angeles

Paleoanthropologist Dr. Donald C. Johanson - founder of human-evolution think tank, the Institute of Human Origins - highlights some of his discoveries, including the most widely known fossil find of last 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 prompted ongoing debate and major revisions in our understanding of the human evolutionary past - because the skeleton possessed an intriguing mixture of ape-like features, but also characters we consider human.