Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection (1960-1976)

Knowledge of the Hamann Museum collection’s existence was not lost and attempts were made to move it or parts of it to other institution(s). The director of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, William E. Scheele, decided that it was important to keep the Hamann Museum collection in Cleveland.  The necessary agreements were reached and slowly the specimens were transferred to The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The non human material was accessioned in the early 1950's and the human material was accessioned starting in 1968. The transfer, made on a permanent loan basis, was completed by 1970.

With the arrival of Drs. David Brose and Milford Wolpoff at Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Anthropology, interest in the collections began to increase.

Patricia Helwig and other Museum staff members worked to make the collections available to the scholarly public.

A young University of Chicago graduate student named Donald Johanson was working on his doctoral thesis at this time. He heard about the collections and in 1968 came to study the collection’s chimpanzee dentitions. As Johanson continued his work and finished his degree, Wolpoff left CWRU for a position at the University of Michigan. Johanson applied for a position on the Case Western Reserve University faculty. He then arranged a joint appointment as Curator of Physical Anthropology at the Museum in 1974 and was given lab space in the basement of the Museum.

In 1974, Johanson discovered the skeleton of a 3.18 million-year-old female hominid in the Afar Triangle (Hadar) of Ethiopia. The 40% complete skeleton was named “Lucy” for the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” The 3 ½ foot-tall Lucy was remarkably complete with a large number of bones preserved. This find had a great impact on the Museum and its field research programs. Funding was obtained to build a new physical anthropology lab in 1976 to house the department’s collections and the fossil finds from Ethiopia. The teaching collection that had once been part of the Western Reserve University’s Hamann Museum was renamed the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection.