Middle Awash Field Season

A very cool report from the San Francisco Chronicle on the fossil hunting in Ethiopia, in the region where the famed “Lucy” was found.  It’s a longish article, but gives a sense of what its like for these anthropologists.

Parched Ethiopian region is ground zero for fossils / Researchers focus on evolution of human ancestors

It is where the team of scientists from the Middle Awash Research Project — explorers of the distant past — arrived for this winter’s field season.The research project is led by Tim D. White of UC Berkeley, Giday Woldegabriel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Berhane Asfaw of Ethiopia’s Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa. It is financed by grants from the National Science Foundation and a UC basic research fund at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

For the anthropologists and geologists and their teams of sharp-eyed young assistants from across Ethiopia, the expedition in December and January was hugely successful. They found intriguing fossil traces of many pre-human hominids — a single tooth here, a part of a fossil leg bone there, stone tools from some of the first tool-makers, and the remains of varied animals that lived 2 million years ago and more.

The teams also found 19 different hominid fossils as well as countless early stone-age tools. They also collected 625 other fossils of long-extinct animals, from animals as large as the hippopotamus and elephant to as small as the shrew. All were evidence for evolution’s ceaseless alteration of life forms as changing environments eliminate the unfit and encourage the better-adapted.

This Middle Awash has long been one of the world’s most productive areas for paleoanthropology. Just north of here, for example, near the village of Hadar, the fossil bones of the famed Lucy were found, 3.2 million years old and more ape than human but still built to walk upright. The region has also yielded the bones of earlier hominids, nearly 6 million years old, and the earliest known fossils of near-modern humans who lived only 160,000 years ago.

A tooth, a leg bone, some tools, and some bones of other animals. Not a bad haul for a year’s worth of digging.

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