Zeresenay Alemseged

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Zeresenay Alemseged, 2013

Zeresenay Alemseged (born June 4, 1969 in Axum , Ethiopia ) is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist .

Zeresenay Alemseged studied geology at the University of Addis Ababa from 1987 to 1990 (degree: BSc ) and then worked at the Laboratory for Paleoanthropology of the National Museum of Ethiopia . From 1993 to 1998 he studied at the French universities of Montpellier II and Paris VI and at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle with a grant from the CNOUS . He earned a graduate degree and a PhD in paleontology .

In 1999 he initiated the Dikika Research Project in the Afar area in Ethiopia, of which he is the director. From 2000 to 2003 he was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University , and from 2004 to 2008 he was a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig . He has since been director and curator of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences .

As part of the Dikika Research Project , in 2000 he discovered the oldest surviving child's skeleton, the 3.3 million year old bones of DIK 1-1 (called “Selam” or “Dikika girl” after the place where it was found), a three-year-old child of the species Australopithecus afarensis . " Lucy ", discovered in 1974, also belongs to the same species .

In 2010 Alemseged was involved in the publication of animal bones from the Dikika site . The V-shaped, crisscrossing scratches on the bones were interpreted as the world's oldest cutting marks, which is also proven by the use of stone tools around 3.4 million years ago. The publication sparked a scientific debate because the interpretation of the notches is controversial, it was objected that it could also be traces of crocodile teeth.

Fonts (selection)

  • Zeresenay Alemseged et al .: A new hominin from the Basal Member of the Hadar Formation, Dikika, Ethiopia, and its geological context. In: Journal of Human Evolution . Volume 49, No. 4, 2005, pp. 499-514, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2005.06.001
  • Zeresenay Alemseged et al .: A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia. In: Nature . Volume 443, 2006, pp. 296-301, doi: 10.1038 / nature05047
  • René Bobe, Zeresenay Alemseged and Anna K. Behrensmeyer (Eds.): Hominin Environments in the East African Pliocene: An Assessment of the Faunal Evidence. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology Series, Springer, Dordrecht 2007, ISBN 978-90-481-6791-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ California Academy of Sciences: Zeresenay (Zeray) Alemseged. ( Memento from May 22, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ California Academy of Sciences: Zeresenay (Zeray) Alemseged. Last accessed on March 31, 2019
  3. ↑ Shannon P. McPherron, Zeresenay Alemseged et al .: Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia. In: Nature. 466, 2010, pp. 857-860, doi: 10.1038 / nature09248
  4. ↑ Shannon P. McPherron, Zeresenay Alemseged et al .: Tool-marked bones from before the Oldowan change the paradigm. In: PNAS . Volume 108, No. 21, E116, 2011, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1101298108
  5. ↑ Yonatan Sahle, Sireen El Zaatari and Tim White : Hominid butchers and biting crocodiles in the African Pliocene-Pleistocene. In: PNAS. Volume 114, No. 50, 2017, pp. 13164-13169, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1716317114
  6. ↑ Jackson K. Njau, Robert J. Blumenschine: A diagnosis of crocodile feeding traces on larger mammal bone, with fossil examples from the Plio-Pleistocene Olduvai Basin, Tanzania. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 50, No. 2, 2006, pp. 142-162, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2005.08.008
personal data
SURNAME Alemseged, Zeresenay
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Alemseged, Zeray
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ethiopian paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th June 1969
PLACE OF BIRTH Aksum