When Berhane Asfaw was in California beginning his graduate studies into the origins of humanity, he realised all the fossils he was examining had come, like himself, from Ethiopia. They had been shipped to the US to be researched and pieced together.
Back then, in the early 1980s, the only Ethiopians working on archaeological digs in their own country were labourers, employed by foreigners.
“Because everything discovered in Ethiopia was exported, there was no chance for Ethiopians to study the items and develop expertise,” says Berhane, who returned home in the late 1980s as his country’s first palaeoanthropologist – a scientist who studies human evolution.
“You can’t train people if everything is taken to France, the US or Britain,” the 70-year-old says.
With his American colleagues, Berhane clawed together funding to establish a laboratory at the National Museum of Ethiopia to clean fossils clogged with rock-hard bits of sediment, a painstaking process that can take years. The laboratory could also produce perfect replicas of specimens for foreign researchers to take home.
“Once we had the lab organised, there was no need to export fossils. We could do everything in-house,” says Berhane.
Housed in an unremarkable grey office block in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, his lab is now home to the world’s most extensive collection of the remains of modern humans’ ancestors: about 1,600 fossils representing 13 of more than 20 confirmed species of early humans. They are stored in a series of bullet-proof safes.
The oldest is of an ape-like creature called Ardipithecus kadabba that lived 6m years ago. The most recent, at 160,000-years-old, represents Homo sapiens, or modern humans, who evolved in east Africa before colonising the rest of the world. The discoveries led to Ethiopia being viewed as the cradle of mankind.
“The range is absolutely staggering. Ethiopia is the only place on Earth where you can find fossils stretching that far back to the present, without any gaps in the record,” says Berhane in his office. It is crammed with books, piles of papers and copies of hominin skulls; in one corner sits the huge, fossilised remains of a 400,000-year-old pair of buffalo horns.
“The history of all humanity is housed in this place,” he says.
On the third floor of the building, a palaeontologist, Yared Assefa, lays several hominin fossils out on a conference table. They include “Lucy”, a 40% complete, 3.2m-year-old skeleton of a female hominin, whose discovery in Ethiopia’s arid Afar region in 1974 was a global sensation.
At the time, the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton represented the oldest human ancestor to be discovered by fossil hunters, and significantly advanced our understanding of humanity’s evolutionary trajectory. Today, her 47 bones are neatly arranged in a series of wooden drawers.
In the cavernous basement are kept the non-human fossils. The vast rows of filing cabinets contain everything from 3m-year-old chimpanzee teeth to fossilised frogs. The giant jaws and tusks of prehistoric elephants and hippos sit on low-slung trolleys.
One of the earliest stone tools used by humans’ ancestors lies in one drawer. It is 2.6m years old and was used for chopping.
“This is an amazing piece,” says a geologist, Gemechis Getaneh, holding it in his palm. “All the technology we have today comes from this stone.”
This vast collection has nurtured a generation of world-leading Ethiopian scholars. Their research has been crucial to shining a light on humanity’s origins. Berhane, for example, is co-leader of the Middle Awash Project in the Afar region, which since the 1990s has discovered eight early humans, including one who lived 6m years ago.
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In 2000, Zeresenay Alemseged, now a professor at the University of Chicago but who started out as a young geologist at the laboratory, unearthed “Selam”, the almost complete skeleton of a child who lived 3.3m years ago and the most complete remains of a human ancestor yet found. The early career of Yohannes Haile-Selassie, who heads the Institute for Human Origins at Arizona State University, also began here.
While still a university student, Yohannes discovered two early hominins that pushed understanding of humanity’s origins back beyond 5m years ago, challenging many assumptions about evolution.
Yohannes lays out his fossil haul from a recent field trip on a table. He says the prominence of local scholars in the continent’s paleoanthropological research is unique to Ethiopia.
“When you look at other African countries with rich fossil records – like Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa – you don’t see the same level of participation, it’s always some white dude,” says Yohannes.
“So Ethiopia takes the lead, and that is a great source of pride for us. The discoveries from the Middle Awash have literally rewritten the history of humanity.”
Ethiopia’s fossil riches stem from a geographic quirk. Its arid northern and southern regions were once full of rivers, lakes and forests – an environment of abundance, perfect for evolution.
These areas sit in the Rift Valley, a great fissure where tectonic activity heaves layers of prehistoric sediment upwards. If they get lucky, fossil hunters can spot and collect specimens on the surface. If no one happens to be there when the fossils appear, they will weather away into dust.
There are now more than 30 Ethiopian palaeoanthropologists at institutions around the world, says Yohannes.
He is setting up an online master’s course in the discipline and related subjects at five universities, in which Arizona State University professors will teach Ethiopian students. It is due to start next year.
“As palaeoanthropologists who live and work abroad, it is our personal responsibility to think about the next generation,” he says. “We want to double, triple, the number of scholars.”
