Donald Johanson Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“I realized immediately that this was a terribly important discovery, but I didn't realize how important it would be until we had spent a lot of time in the laboratory studying it.”

“I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction.”

“This was the most important discovery I had ever made in my life. It was a discovery which has irrevocably changed my whole life's direction. It immediately elevated me to the status of one of the world's leading anthropologists.”

“Evolution is a fact. It is the best explanation of what is known from observations. It's a theory as powerful as the theory of gravity.”

“Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.”

“You don't just magically flip some evolutionary switch somewhere and transmute a quadruped into an upright-walking bipedal human.”

“I find a tremendous receptivity among the public for the subject matter of, 'Where did we come from and how did we get here?' 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.”

“My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.”

“It's very hard for all of us, when we've committed ourselves to a particular interpretation, to change our minds.”

“Regardless of what we look like on the outside, genetically, on the inside, everyone is an African.”