Medium awash

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Location of the middle Awash on the southwestern edge of the triangular Afar Depression

The Middle Awash is a paleoanthropological and archaeological site along the Awash River on the southwestern edge of the Afar Depression in Ethiopia .

Fossil finds

At the Middle Awash , the remains of numerous individuals of the Pleistocene and Miocene hominini have been found, as well as some of the oldest Oldowan stone tools and pieces of baked clay . The latter serve as - controversial - clues for the use of fire; Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in northern Israel is the first to find a secure site of burnt human food remains, which is associated with Homo erectus and is around 790,000 years old.

The oldest hominini finds are almost 6 million years old and thus very close to the era during which the lineages of chimpanzees and humans separated.

The sediments here today were originally deposited in lakes and rivers. The contained carbonates have a lower carbon - isotope ratio on. From this it can be concluded that the climate at the time of the late Miocene, in contrast to today, was humid and that the area was covered by open forest or savanna forests. Further evidence of such vegetation are the fossilized remains of vertebrates like the cane rat is that along with the pre-human were found -Fossilien. This area was also characterized by recurring volcanic eruptions . The resulting dissection through crevices and cracks in the earth presumably enabled the emergence of different ecological niches which could then be colonized by different vertebrate species and which today facilitate the radiometric dating of the finds.

Important hominin fossils found in the Middle Awash include:

Historical background

The Bodo skull

In 1966, the then 63-year-old Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey of British descent received approval from the Ethiopian government to search for fossils on their territory. Until then, only a French research group around Camille Arambourg (1885–1969), who had been leading excavations on the lower reaches of the Omo River since the 1930s , had such a permit . Leakey, who led excavations in Kenya and especially in the Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania , transferred responsibility for the Ethiopia project to his American colleague Francis Clark Howell , who, like Arambourg, considers the area on the lower reaches of the Omo to be scientifically special estimated profitable. From 1967 onwards, an international research project was started there, consisting of French, North American and Kenyan participants who worked on separate concessions . Each of the three teams was led by its own leader, Yves Coppens (suggested by Arambourg), Howell, and Louis Leakey's son, Richard Leakey . Already in the first year an important fossil was discovered in the area of ​​the French concession, which Arambourg & Coppens ascribed to the new species Paranthropus aethiopicus . In the area of ​​the Kenyan concession the fragments of the fossils Omo 1 and Omo 2 (very old finds of anatomically modern man ) were recovered from 1967 , and numerous hominine fossils were also discovered in the area of ​​the American concession; In addition, the paleontologist Basil Cooke described a biostratigraphy of the numerous layers of finds based on fossil pig teeth

As early as 1968, Richard Leakey decided to use the money raised by the National Geographic Society for his Ethiopia project for studies in the mouth of the Omo, on Kenyan territory, east of Lake Turkana (then: Lake Rudolf); the area turned out to be a productive site, among other things , the first evidence of the new species Homo rudolfensis was discovered there in 1972, under the scientific direction of Glynn Isaac .

In the excavation years 1970 and 1971 Donald Johanson , then a doctoral student of Clark Howell, accompanied him as his “dental expert”. During these study visits, Johanson met the French geologist Maurice Taieb , who had been mapping the geology of the Afar triangle for his doctoral thesis since 1966 . Taieb reported to Johanson that he had seen numerous fossils in the Afar Triangle that came from the Pliocene and Pleistocene layers of the earth. In 1972 Taieb, Johanson and Jon Kalb , who had already mapped several times in the Afar triangle with Taieb, went to this remote region on the Awash River ; an area known as Hadar turned out to be so rich in hominine fossils that Johanson led his own research team, the International Afar Research Expedition , as early as 1973 , and this year discovered the fossil AL 129-1 , the first knee ever made by an early hominid , and in 1974 the fossil Lucy . A little south of Hadar is the Dikika site, described by Jon Kalb in 1972 .

Jon Kalb had separated from Taieb and Johanson as early as 1974 and initiated his own project, a little above Hadar, in the region known as the Middle Awash . The first significant find of this Rift Valley Research Mission in Ethopia (RVRME) was the 600,000 year old, so-called Bodo skull from the locality Bodo D'Ar, which some researchers placed near the immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) becomes. From 1981 to 2002 John Desmond Clark was director and co-director of the Middle Awash Research Project , then Tim White .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry Middle Awash Research Project in: Bernard Wood : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4051-5510-6 .
  2. ↑ Barbara Ann Kipfer: Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archeology . Springer Verlag, 2000, ISBN 0306461587
  3. ^ Bogucki: Origins of Human Society. Blackwell Publishing September 1, 1999, ISBN 1577181123
  4. ↑ Naama Goren-Inbar et al .: Evidence of Hominin Control of Fire at Gesher Benot Ya`aqov, Israel. In: Science . Volume 304, 2004, pp. 725-727, doi: 10.1126 / science.1095443
  5. ^ A b Yohannes Haile-Selassie: Late Miocene hominids from the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. In: Nature . Volume 412, No. 6843, 2001, pp. 178-181, doi: 10.1038 / 35084063
  6. ↑ a b Bimodal volcanism and rift basin development in the Middle Awash region, Ethiopia.Retrieved April 12, 2006
  7. ^ Seth Borenstein: New Fossil Links Up Human Evolution . The Associated Press April 13, 2006 [1]
  8. ^ Ian Tattersall : The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack - and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2015, pp. 114-131, ISBN 978-1-137-27889-0
  9. ^ Glenn C. Conroy, Clifford J. Jolly, Douglas Cramer, and Jon E. Kalb: Newly discovered fossil hominid skull from the Afar depression, Ethiopia. In: Nature . Volume 276, 1978, pp. 67-70, doi: 10.1038 / 276067a0
  10. ^ John Desmond Clark et al .: African Homo erectus: old radiometric ages and young Oldowan assemblages in the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia. In: Science . Volume 264, No. 5167, 1994, pp. 1907–1910, doi: 10.1126 / science.8009220 , full text (PDF)
  11. ↑ Bodo skull. On: humanorigins.si.edu , last accessed on March 25, 2019
  12. ^ Entry Rift Valley Research Mission in Ethiopia in: Bernard Wood : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution . Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4051-5510-6 .