Archaeologists working in the Ethiopian desert last month found a hominid skull they believe to be some half-million years old. Sileshi Semaw of Indiana University, Bloomington, who is director of excavations at a site called Gona, announced the find last week in Addis Ababa. The skull, which is missing a jaw, could be tremendously important because fossils from this era--the Middle Pleistocene--are exceedingly rare. Yet this is the crucial time when modern Homo sapiens emerged from Homo erectus.
Paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, says the closest hominid skull in time and place is from another Ethiopian site, the Middle Awash. Known as Bodo, it was found in 1976. But White says the Bodo skull had a more massive face and brow ridge than the current find. "Once again, the Afar [region] has yielded a very important fossil that is going to figure prominently in our ability to understand human evolution when it's been dated and studied," he adds. Semaw and his team say they are optimistic about getting a secure age for the fossil because of the many distinct layers of volcanic ash in the area.
CREDIT: SILESHI SEMAW
