Yohannes Haile-Selassie

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Yohannes Haile-Selassie, 2017

Yohannes Haile-Selassie ( Amharic : ዮሀንስ ኃይለ ሥላሴ; born February 23, 1961 in Adigrat , Ethiopia ) is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist . He became known in specialist circles through several finds from early pre-humans , including the type specimen of the species he named Ardipithecus kadabba . He mainly explores the fossil sites along the Awash in the so-called Afar Triangle .

education

Yohannes Haile-Selassie grew up without a father or siblings and lived with different relatives from the age of nine. At the age of 17 he began to study history in Addis Ababa - the subject had been prescribed to him by the authorities. In 1982 he obtained a bachelor's degree. In return for attending college , which was free of tuition fees in Ethiopia at the time , the graduates were obliged to work in the civil service for at least two years; Yohannes Haile-Selassie was assigned to the Ministry of Culture and got his job in the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.

His start of work coincided with a moratorium that was supposed to protect the cultural heritage of Ethiopia and suspended the excavation permits granted to foreign paleoanthropologists until 1990. This particularly affected Donald Johanson's project in Hadar as well as the preparation of John Desmond Clark and Tim White for the Middle Awash project, which began in 1981 . Haile-Selassie got to know these researchers because he had to clean and organize the fossils stored there in the museum. The preoccupation with the bone finds aroused his interest in paleoanthropology, so that he obtained specialist books and acquired some knowledge in self-study.

In 1988 Berhane Asfaw , who had just become the first Ethiopian to earn a doctorate in anthropology , received a special permit to explore new paleoanthropological sites. Haile-Selassie, who had worked as a research assistant in the paleoanthropology laboratory of the Ethiopian National Museum since 1985, was seconded to this research team as the representative of the Ministry of Culture. In the same function, he worked with Tim White at the Middle Awash in 1990 and 1991 for the resumed Middle Awash Research Project , where he proved his skill in finding hominine fossils. Berhane Asfaw, who had been director of the National Museum since 1990, and Tim White advised Haile-Selassie to apply for a scholarship in the USA , which the Wenner-Gren Foundation granted him from 1992 .

Yohannes Haile-Selassie therefore resumed his academic training and in 1995 initially obtained a master's degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley . In 2001, under the guidance of Tim White, he was awarded a PhD in Integrative Biology for his study “Late Miocene Mammalian Fauna from the Middle Awash Valley, Ethiopia”.

Since 2002, Haile-Selassie has been the curator of the Department of Physical Anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Cleveland , USA. At the same time, he was appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University .

Research work

Yohannes Haile-Selassie worked in the Middle Awash project from the start and discovered the first fossil finds of Ardipithecus kadabba . On November 5, 1994, he also found the first two fragments of the " Ardi ", 4.4 million year old skeleton of an Ardipithecus ramidus . Furthermore, in November 1997 he discovered the type specimen of Australopithecus garhi , a 2.5 million year old brain skull. His field of work also generally includes the paleontology of the vertebrates of East Africa and their evolution in the Upper Miocene as well as the paleobiogeography and paleoecology of this epoch.

In 2005 he and his team discovered the partial skeleton KSD-VP-1/1 of Australopithecus afarensis in the Afar region , which is significantly larger and older than " Lucy ".

In 2012, Haile-Selassie, the lead author, described the Burtele foot , a 3.4 million year old fossil that has not yet been assigned to a specific species and was discovered in the Woranso-Mille research area - 360 kilometers northeast of Addis Ababa .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Curriculum vitae , accessed on March 26, 2018.
  2. ↑ Tim D. White et al .: Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids. In: Science . Volume 326, 2009, p. 76, doi : 10.1126 / science.1175802
  3. ^ Website of Yohannes Haile-Selassie. On: cmnh.org , accessed March 26, 2018
  4. ^ Yohannes Haile-Selassie et al .: An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia. In: PNAS . Volume 107, No. 27, 2010, pp. 12121-12126, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1004527107
  5. ^ Yohannes Haile-Selassie et al .: A new hominin foot from Ethiopia shows multiple Pliocene bipedal adaptations. In: Nature . Volume 483, 2012, pp. 565-569, doi : 10.1038 / nature10922
personal data
SURNAME Haile-Selassie, Yohannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ethiopian paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 23, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Adigrat , Ethiopia