Exciting find in Ethiopia

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33433, 15 January 1974, Page 13

Exciting find in Ethiopia

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)*

LONDON, January 14.

An American anthropologist working in Ethiopia has found fossil remains of a man who walked upright more than 3 million years ago, remains which pre-date [by 500,000 years the earliestknown specimen. The discovery by Dr Carl Johanson, is reported in the “Sunday Times” by Martin Meredith, who says that an even more exciting factor of the research work is that the 250-square-mile area around the Hadar River basin, near the town of Dessye, the Ethiopian province of Wollo, is rich in fossils between 3 million and 5 million years old, a period about which virtually nothing is known at present.

Dr Johanson began his studies in southern Ethiopia in 1971, and in the following year he joined a French team surveying the Awash Valley, north of Addis Ababa. The hitherto earliest-known fossil of a man who walked upright was found in neighbouring Kenya in 1972, by the anthropologist, Professor Richard Leakey. It was part of a skull, and was estimated to be 25 million years old.