Maurice Taieb

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maurice Taieb (born July 22, 1935 in Bizerte , Tunisia , † July 23, 2021 in Marseille ) was a French geologist .

Taieb was a pioneer in paleoanthropological research in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia . As part of the Omo Research Expedition , he mapped the geological layers along the Awash River in the Afar Triangle for his doctoral thesis from 1966 . This enabled numerous paleontologists and paleoanthropologists to search for potential sites of fossil vertebrates , with the result that, particularly in the area of ​​the Middle Awash, numerous important hominine fossils of Ardipithecus , Australopithecus and the early archaic Homo sapiens were recovered.

research

Maurice Taieb was the son of Sephardic parents (the father was Tunisian, the mother French) and completed his school education in Bizerta. He completed his basic studies in natural sciences in 1956 at the University of Nice , after which he studied geology at the University of Tunis and temporarily supported relatives who were looking for oil in the Sahara . From 1962 to 1964 he was stationed in France as a soldier in the French army. In 1965 he was accepted into a doctoral program at the University of Paris , which led to his first stay in Ethiopia in 1966.

The background to this was that the French geologist Camille Arambourg had already carried out an expedition to the Omo River in Ethiopia in 1932/33. In the mid-1960s, the then Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie , personally granted permission for paleoanthropological field research in the Omo region after a state visit to Kenya and a conversation with Louis Leakey . As a result, the international Omo Research Expedition , which began researching in Ethiopia in 1967, was founded in 1966 , consisting of a small Kenyan team led by Richard Leakey , a US team led by Francis Clark Howell and a French team led by Camille Arambourg and - after his death (1969) - by Yves Coppens . Maurice Taieb was the geologist of the French team and, in later years, was also responsible for the dating of find layers, among other things. in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania as well as in Kenya, Morocco and India .

In an acknowledgment of his work Taieb was named "Paleoanthropology's Unsung Hero" in the journal Science in 2006 . His basic geological research was "less glamorous " than finding fossil bones, but it made a prediction by Charles Darwin come true. Darwin had argued in his work The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection that the lack of fossil remains, “which connect humans with their ape-like progenitors”, was primarily due to “that those areas which most likely present such remains, the connect humans to some extinct ape-like creature, which has not yet been investigated by geologists. ”Taieb in 1969/70 the geological age of the site later called Hadar and some time later the geological age of Aramis as particularly promising for the search for Having recognized hominine fossils, he had made a major contribution to the discovery of, for example, the fossil Lucy in Hadar in 1974 and the fossil Ardi in Aramis .

Maurice Taieb married his German girlfriend in 1964 and the couple had two children. Taieb died in July 2021, one day after his 86th birthday.

Fonts (selection)

  • Maurice Taieb, Yves Coppens , Donald Johanson and Jon Kalb : Dépôts sédimentaires et faunes du Plio-Pléistocène de la basse vallée de l'Awash (Afar central, Ethiopie). In: Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences. Volume 275, 1972, pp. 819-822.
  • Maurice Taieb, Yves Coppens, Donald Johanson and Raymonde Bonnefille: Hominidés de l'Afar central, Ethiopie (Site d'Hadar, campagne 1973). In: Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris. XIII ° Series, Volume 2, No. 2, 1975, pp. 117-124, full text .
  • Maurice Taieb, Donald Johanson, Yves Coppens and James L. Aronson: Geological and paleontological background of Hadar hominid site, Afar, Ethiopia. In: Nature . Volume 260, 1976, pp. 289-293, doi: 10.1038 / 260289a0 .
  • Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb: Plio-Pleistocene hominid discoveries in Hadar, Ethiopia. In: Nature. Volume 260, 1976, pp. 293-297, doi: 10.1038 / 260293a0 , full text .
  • James L. Aronson and Maurice Taieb: Geology and Paleogeography of the Hadar Hominid Site, Ethiopia. Chapter 6 in: George Rapp, Jr. and Carl F. Vondra: Hominid Sites: Their Geology Settings. AAAS Selected Symposium 63rd Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1981, ISBN 0-86531-262-1 , pp. 165-195, full text .
  • Donald Johanson, Maurice Taieb and Yves Coppens: Pliocene hominids from the Hadar Formation, Ethiopia (1973-1977): stratigraphic, chronologic, and paleoenvironmental contexts, with notes on hominid morphology and systematics. In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 57, No. 4, 1982, pp. 373-402, doi: 10.1002 / ajpa.1330570402 , full text .
  • Endale Tamrat, Nicolas Thouveny, Maurice Taieb and Neil D. Opdyke: Revised magnetostratigraphy of the Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary sequence of the Olduvai Formation (Tanzania). In: Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology and Paleoecology. Volume 114, No. 2-4, 1995, pp. 273-283, doi: 10.1016 / 0031-0182 (94) 00080-R .

literature

  • Jon Kalb : Adventures in the Bone Trade. The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Copernicus Books, New York 2001, ISBN 0-387-98742-8 .

Web links

  • The history man. On: nature.com from September 20, 2006. At the same time: Nature. Volume 443, 2006, pp. 268-269.

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Entry in the Catalog Général of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
  2. ↑ a b c Jon Kalb : Adventures in the Bone Trade, p. 35.
  3. ^ Maurice Taieb est parti rejoindre Lucy. CNRS press release of July 27, 2021. Archive version ( Memento of July 27, 2021 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Alexandre Vella: Marseille: Le géologue qui a découvert le squelette de Lucy est décédé à 86 ans. In: 20minutes.fr. July 27, 2021, accessed August 2, 2021 (French).
  5. ^ Maurice Taieb: Evolution Quaternaire du bassin de l'Awash. Dissertation. Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 1974.
  6. ↑ Gerald G. Eck: The Effects of Collection Strategy and Effort on Faunal Recovery. Chapter 8 in: René Bobe, Zeresenay Alemseged and Anna K. Behrensmeyer (Eds.): Hominin Environments in the East African Pliocene: An Assessment of the Faunal Evidence. Springer, Dordrecht 2007, ISBN 978-1-4020-3097-0 , SS 184-185.
  7. ↑ Ann Gibbons: Paleoanthropology's Unsung Hero. In: Science . Volume 312, No. 5781, 2006, p. 1740, doi: 10.1126 / science.312.5781.1740 .
  8. ↑ Charles Darwin : Human Descent and Sexual Selection . 3. Revised edition, Chapter 6, p. 206. E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart 1875, full text .
personal data
SURNAME Taieb, Maurice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French geologist
BIRTH DATE July 22, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Bizerte , Tunisia
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Marseille