CARTA: Early Hominids: A New Cradle for Mankind; Early Hominids of Ethiopia

this ucsd-tv program is a presentation of university of california television for educational and non-commercial use only good afternoon my name is Pascal Yan you I'm the Associate Director of Carta and it is my pleasure to welcome you all today for this public Carta symposium on early hominids we're very fortunate to have a cast of eminent researchers from four different continents and I'd like to thank all the speakers for traveling very far in some cases to make this conference possible and with no further ado it's my pleasure to introduce dr. Fred gage from the Salk Institute Carter co-director Thank You Pascal and I'd like to add my welcome to to you all so kartaa actually is the center for academic research and training in anthropology so what's anthropogenic the most recent definition of the term from the Oxford English Dictionary is investigation the origin of humans however as early as 1839 in the hopper medical district the study it was defined as the study of the generation of man so we have a mission statement for this organization and it is to use all rational and ethical approaches to seek all verifiable facts from all relevant disciplines to explore and explain the origins of the human phenomenon an important caveat here is while we minimize the complex organizational structures and hierarchies that often infest these kinds of in organizations and avoid any under unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy the hope is to get to the science and get the discussions out front this would not be possible without our major sponsors who with great foresight sponsored this organization the graduate graduate program that surrounds it as well as these conferences and the first one is the G Harold and Lea Mathers Charitable Foundation based in New York and secondarily but not least Annette Merrill Schmitt is very much appreciated for her continued support of this effort these individuals are our foresight for sighted and extremely important for us thank you all for coming and now it's my wonderful privilege to introduce Michelle Brene from Portier so when I begin to look for early hominid the situation was very clear early hominin was known in South Africa in East Africa and its hold and when I decided to go west of the rift I was a young boy at this time 25 years ago I'm still a young boy you don't believe so ok we shall speak as he had every people say barrini you are crazy there is no facility of the rift so we can try I go to Cameroon first because there is a war in Chad there's very often a war in chat and in 1994 the war stopped and I go to child it means 16 years ago and now in Chad we are 500 localities and more than 20,000 fussing but it's not the end of a story that I'm telling you today it's just the beginning just the beginning we are very lucky we are working in a very very nice desert do you have desert here you see of course you need a lot of jib Germany is here Lake Chad and we are working here south of ste beastie lecture that this time is five thousand square kilometres five thousand years Lake Chad was four hundred thousand square kilometres it was mega black shade and with my team we show that you have a succession of wet and dry period at least at least during the last eight million all the site you see in green is a lake Chad basin and in black here is a show of the last mega leg chart the actual Lake Chad and we are digging in this part you are here Aeolian para lacustrine and like history in facias and its cyclic you see a web judge is a very nice place for geologists or is flat tectonic is very quiet it's the only thing which is quiet in chat and of course our geologists are very happy because if you want to make an outcrops you have to do it nice work nice job we have a lot of fossil this one is a very interesting one this one is an attribute period stanked mammal is a sister group of hippopotamus amphibious mammal big one big like hippopotamus which is very interesting in that wisdom I in child we have the same spaces of entrecote aid that you have in libya in the CH basin it means that you have the same bio province at this time between Libya and child it means that to my can go to Libya can go from Libya to child and you have no integrity read east of the waves east of the wave kids another bio province we have fossil with water fish crab birds we have amphibious fossil forest color beam some cousin of elephant Dino terraeum in first - and we have ecwid deep a lien until up Lepus in savannah it means that we are mosaic landscape probably something which is very close to the actual Okavango Delta so it means that probably to my was living in such a landscape and in this landscape it was probably living in a forest part in shudder we are fossil from 3 million to 7 million the first hominid we found is a nostril death scene which is dated around 3.5 million it is known by a larger and some authorities which has not published at the moment so first thing remember per human are just known South Africa East Africa now you have Australia blessing in some twelve Africa it's a little bit different to my tamales holder we are to detention for to my bio stratigraphic detection by the relative degree of the mammalian assemblage which to mine which give us something around seven and we have with cosmo nucleate barium 10 the same de tation above to my 683 behind 712 it's around 7 million we have large oh and you can see just Tim told you about the feminized canine you have a lower canine here very small one the cranium was a little bit crush you imagine if you have your granule doing 7 million in sediment it's a long time so we make the construction work construction as you can see on this and you have ears 3d constriction this one you have the cast here you have the virtual high image on the screen and you have the cast here ok I put it here it's not viateur you can touch it bipedal not buy better it's clear just like ah DB tackles the basic cranium is shortened and firm and occipital is forward as you can see on this picture when you are a cranium lizard you cannot construct we do that with an artist in Paris why here's why happened his mouth because we are very often discussing together ah why not we our friend he's not lucky because I'm in San Diego is still in question so I think that you are looking for the moment at the earliest hominid known face and I think that it's probably like that it means that if to my did some bad thing in the university here if you have this picture you can catch it and now what we know look that I go late miocene hominid late myosin hominid did just a synonym that of my friend Tim Cole a DP Degas and right yeah no because I checked my English I don't understand hole so let my Orson hominid what you have you have to east of the reef one in each area one in Kenya : around six million and they are very close in term of geography and remember they belong to the same bio province east of the rift a little bit holder probably 1 million holder we have another one to my in child I think that it's just the beginning of something just because of course look at this map here you have the beginning of a new story surely we are still digging where I'm digging in Libya I'm digging in Egypt I just come back from Cameroon so when you invite me in 20 years I am still young I shall have a lot of new things to show you so which is very interesting is that repetition is completely different as you can see all these phases result publish in international peer review magazine as you can see is just some semi panet and harmony to sister group we need more our team say but for this time we have some idea about already a lot of thing Thanks nice picture No and I'm now going to introduce my colleague Johannes haile selassie Johannes is from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History he'll be talking about the earliest hominids from Ethiopia this is something you don't want to miss watch for the name johannes Haile Selassie he has new sights new fossils he's going to challenge Brunei good afternoon today I'm going to talk about the earliest hominins from Ethiopia when I got this title I was thinking about how do I determine the earliest hominins when we have more than 20 species of early human ancestors so I'm going to talk about those that were found in if you appear only now as I said there are about 22 early human ancestor species that are known in the fossil record and when it comes to our evolutionary history Ethiopia is usually dubbed as the Cradle of Humankind now why is that and I'm showing here a phylogenetic sort of a phylogenetic tree of the human family tree and when you look at how many of these taxa have been found from Ethiopia there are about 11 of them that was that were found from Ethiopia so that tells you why the Opia is usually dubbed as the Cradle of Humankind it has some of the earliest hominids that I'm going to talk about today and also some of the younger hominids that as you as you see from this slide so the question is why do we have this many hominid fossils from Ethiopia and dr. white explained a little bit about this it appears a country located in the Horn of Africa you can see here and geographically it's situated in an area where three different plates of the earth are moving apart from each other and creating huge Rift Valley and this Rift Valley has been expanding and it is still expanding because of tectonics and it has luckily exposed about six million years of our evolutionary history and that's why people have been going to this place for the last four decades and looking for some of the remains of our earliest ancestors when you look at the distribution of this hominids that I mentioned earlier they're mostly located within the afar triple The rifts area as you can see here and some of them extend to the main Ethiopian Rift and also to southern Ethiopia so here is the secret behind why Ethiopia is really the Cradle of Humankind now the earliest hominids I would usually call are the ones that are older than three million years and this include Ardipithecus Kadapa Ardipithecus ramidus which dr. white also mentioned Australopithecus animus is from slightly younger deposits and Australopithecus afarensis which is the species to which the famous Lucy belongs to but obviously I'm going to talk about the first the earliest two redeeming ancestors Ardipithecus Catawba and Ardipithecus ramidus now the big question is we know that our family is home any day but we ask ourselves what kind of species should be included into our family there has to be specific characters that refer to this family Hominidae and basically there are two major characters that define the family Hominidae one of them is being bipedal walking on two legs with the only mammals or habitual bipeds and the second character has to do with the teeth hominids do not have the canine Hornung function like Apes so we don't hone our upper canines by rubbing it against the lower promoter which apes do we have changed our social structure that we didn't need that Hornung function enema so those are the two characters that usually define the family humidity so by using this character you have early human remains from 5.8 million years ago and when they were found there were 1.4 million years older than the oldest known at that time Ardipithecus ramidus so you have to be really careful in terms of recognizing this as belonging to the family Hominidae so we had to look for the specific characters that enable us to include them into the family home in it so this is what we had to look for but obviously dr. white showed you that the earliest hominid fossils could actually be fit into a shoebox which is true most of the specimens that we had when we named Ardipithecus Catawba in 2001 were 17 specimens mostly isolated teeth but of course based on these remains we try to look at what characters distinguish this early hominid from the other knowns taxa of early hominids so that we don't make mistakes in terms of recognizing a new species when it actually belongs to something that was already named so we had to look for specific characters in this in this early hominid species it's very limited in terms of its geographic distribution most of them come from the western margin of the middle our study area this is the rift margin the western rift margin of the Alpha rift and we found most of the specimens right along the rift age right here but we also had one specimen from slightly younger deposits at 5.2 million years from Amba east these are between 5.5 and 5.8 that was the youngest specimen we had actually included into the Ardipithecus Kadapa hypo dime at that time but we also have some Ardipithecus Kodama remains from farther north at the place called gona which my colleague dr. Samar will talk about a little later so as you can see what we had was mostly isolated teeth with some post cranial elements that you can see here some arm bones including the toe bone that I mentioned from the younger deposit so based on this what we tried to do was to look at the major characters that we could pick up from this dental and post cranial elements and see if it actually belongs to the family Hominidae but of course we're talking about the earliest hominid and obviously it's going to have a lot of primitive characters that are probably closer to the common ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees so the one thing we we looked at because we had an upper canine of Ardipithecus Kadapa was the morphology of this tooth because it has a haunting function in the Apes and we wanted to look at whether it had Hornung function or not but the first thing is we see that this this canine is really primitive and also the lower third promoter looks very primitive so that's something that distinguish it it distinguishes it from the known earliest timing at that time which is Ardipithecus ramidus at four point four we also try to look at CF Ardipithecus Kodama had a honing function as in chimpanzees this is a female chimpanzee that you see here and this are a composite of Ardipithecus Kadapa teeth and what we realize is that it is really primitive but not like an ape it was not really we can't really say for sure if it were if it were honing if it was honing its upper canine by rubbing it against the lower p3 but interestingly enough the lower p3 had a little facet on the side which indicates that it was actually overlapping with the upper canine but we can't really be sure whether it was a function there was a functional honing mechanism in Ardipithecus cadabra or not because the lower canines tell us a different story in terms of their morphology so obviously that could be simply a relict of what they got from the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees the other element from the younger deposits that we included into Ardipithecus Kadabra was this toe bone and this is the toe bone that we used infer bipedality in Ardipithecus Kadapa now after we looked at Ardipithecus ramidus particularly our D we had to reconsider our conclusions from the first one and now what we're saying is that habitual bipedality since we didn't even see it in Ardipithecus ramidus remains to be ascertain by further discoveries and we're still looking for more discoveries in this part of the middle hours so that's about what I have to say about Ardipithecus Kadapa the next oldest is Ardipithecus ramidus now Ardipithecus ramidus is a species that's been known from the deposits about 4.4 million year old deposits from the middle hours and it's also known from further to the north from a site called Ghana and I'm sure dr. Sommer will mention that but this is where Ardipithecus was initially found the first specimen as a dr. white mission was found in 1992 but in 1993 there was another important specimen found from aramis which is this child's Joe that you see here which had the milk molar now this milk molar had to say a lot about its morphology in which way it's related to obviously it's not like entirely ape-like but it's not also like hominid hominid like and like later hominis so it was intermediate between Apes and hominids and it shows how primitive it is and it warranted its distinction from other species of Australopithecus so the first piece of Rd which is the most critical specimen in the Rd Ardipithecus hypo dime was found in the first piece was found in 1994 three years excavation 17 years of curation preparation and analysis resulted in the 11 paper publications in science dr. white mentioned earlier but that's very interesting because we learned a lot from this partial skeleton in terms of its morphological features now I want to mention some of the highlight points of Rd in relation to what we know of the better hominids now when you look at the cranium of Rd which I'm sure dr. also I will talk more about later it had small brain its face was not as projecting as in chimpanzees and probably comp - - my witch doctor Bruni showed us and which is right here in other aspects the canine of Rd is not like a chimpanzee it's large K it had large canines but it's not like in chimpanzees the Crown's of them their teeth were shorter and there was no sexual dimorphism between males and females as much as we see in chimpanzees so those are like derived characters that put them into the family Hominidae and more we don't see any functional cp3 owning complex our deepika cos was not haunting its upper canine like Apes do so that differentiates it from apes and puts it into the hominid family so based on what we learned from its teeth and the overall morphology and size it was not as specialized it didn't have a specialized diet it was more of a general omnivore and froggy more so this is what we learned from are these teeth we also had luckily complete hands of Rd and what we learned from the hand elements is that it had a very flexible palm it was not a wrist it was not as frigid as the knuckle Walker cousins like chimpanzees and gorillas and we don't also see any characters of suspension or vertical climbing in this hands so it was more adapted to palm Ingrid clambering and we don't see any sign of knuckle walking in this in this hand so these are very important specimens that he was as you will see later the other element which is very critical in terms of inferring its locomotion is the hip bone now you saw a slide from dr. Troy it's talk of the pelvis which was crushed and it had to be reconstructed but there were very critical features on the pelvis that were not distorted which actually tells us about its locomotory behavior now as you know the pelvis or the hip bone is not just you know an obstetric organ it's also a local mitrik organ so it tells us about how this animal how animals move about by looking at the morphology so here we have a comparison of four pelvis this is a modern human this is Lucy's pelvis this is our D and here is a chimpanzee pelvis now there are major characters that distinguish it from the Apes and that are human-like include a feature called anterior inferior iliac spine which is present in bipedal animals and not in quadruped it's another feature which is called a greater sciatic notch which is also present in bipeds and not quadruped it so these two characters seem to be shared by humans appearances or Lucy and Ardipithecus some indications of its bipedality but at the same time it had a feature that's more like an ape which is the position of what we call the ischial tuberosity which is more like an ape than it is like the humans so she had a mosaic of features that sample derived hominids and also and also Apes but you look at the foot I don't have to get into this in detail because dr. white has already mentioned about it but it's really interesting that it had an opposable toe it's really applied foot and it had Kurt phalanges the fingers were really curved and the grasping big toe and it didn't have any arch obviously she wouldn't have been part of the army with that foot so we have this primitive ape-like characters so what is she obviously she there is evidence that she was able to walk on two legs on the ground but not in the way that we do it today so the she had she was a facultative biped who was able to walk on two legs one on the ground but also able to climb up one trees but because of her and what we know from her a number of hypotheses that existed before were tasted and let me tell you some of these hypotheses one of them is what's called the Savannah hypothesis for bipedality the other one is that we evolved from a cup from a knuckle Walker ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees and another one has to do with chimpanzees being good models to reconstruct the common ancestor we shared with them now what we learned from our D is that she was not living in open savanna environment she was living in a more woodland forested habitat so that savanna hypothesis was falsified of course I was falsified with other evidence - did we walk from a knuckle Walker no she doesn't show any sign of knuckle walking on our hands that gets falsified and the other one is obviously chimpanzees cannot be good models for the common ancestor we shared with with with with them because think about the chimpanzees have been evolving so much since they split from the common ancestor they shared with us it's really interesting to see that our distant cousin gorillas in some cases share character with humans than chimpanzees do so that tells you how much in pansy stuff involves so using chimpanzees as model is really wrong so that was also falsified so in general when you look at what's come up since Rd it looks like it causes a major paradigm shift in terms of how and where we should look for the model for the common ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees and not only that it also quotients as to how we define the family itself the family Hominidae are the two characters that I showed you earlier enough to define the family Hominidae maybe not so when it was published it was recognized as a major scientific breakthrough at least in human evolution studies and that is really true so that's what I have about Rd but slightly younger earliest hominids would include species like Australopithecus Anna mean C's which is also known from Ethiopia largely known from Kenya from deposits dated to between 3.9 and 4.2 million years ago but we also have an immense remains from the middle hours from localities where our deeper kilometers was found and our Australopithecus an immense in the middle our watch was found from slightly younger horizons at same localities so that might strengthen the hypotheses of Ardipithecus ramidus being the ancestor of Australopithecus animus which is more likely as we know it right now the other one the other species younger but still earliest hominid is the species which includes the famous Lucy Australopithecus afarensis now this is one of the species early how many species that is well known because we've known Australopithecus afarensis since the 1970s and there are hundreds of fossil remains of Australopithecus afarensis mostly from Ethiopia but also known from Kenya and Tanzania so we have a wealth of information about Australopithecus afarensis than any of the other tax our early hominid tax table now partial skeletons are really rare in the fossil record there are probably five or six partial skeletons in the entire human evolutionary fossil record and it happens that we have most of them belonging to the species Australopithecus afarensis Lucy is the first one which was found in 1974 and then in 2003 an Ethiopian peel anthropologist and Adams Leggett announced the discovery of a partial skeleton of a child of Australopithecus afarensis which he nicknamed Salim and recently as dr. white mentioned we announced another partial skeleton of the same species nicknamed kadhai pneumo and this partial skeleton is dated to about 3.6 million years old and it's about 400,000 years older than Lucy now what's really interesting is that we still have gaps in the fossil record as dr. white mentioned and what Kodomo and all the other specimens that we're finding from this Sitecore dorans remember is that they're feeling some of these gaps that exist between Australopithecus an immense ease and Lucy species Australopithecus afarensis so what that means is that we can actually see how this two taxa are related to each other by filling the gap in the fossil record right here right now a lot of people agree that Australopithecus annemun sees is the direct ancestor of Australopithecus afarensis or Lucy species and that hypothesis would be better tested if we could actually fill this gap in the fossil record right here but what we're finding here already shows that the hypothesis of ancestor descendant relationship between these two taxa cannot be falsified but it challenges the idea of actually recognizing two different taxonomic names probably for a single file ethically evolving lineage so the suggestion right now at least as far as I'm concerned is that Australopithecus an immense is and Australopithecus afarensis are two ends of the same file ethically evolving lineage and I'm suggesting that we should probably use just afarensis to include everything from four point two to three million years but of course some people have issues with that but that's what I have and I could I could talk about Australopithecus afarensis and Hanuman sees for probably another hour but that would be a subject of another lecture and I'll stop here thank thank you very much dr. haile selassie for a wonderful presentation bringing us back to Anatomy and letting all of you students know that if you want to study human evolution you're going to have to learn your dental and post cranial Anatomy last year many of you know was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birthday and wouldn't it be amazing if Darwin were here today to see the amazing evidence that people like Johannes haile selassie have been finding in the ethiopian desert to show how we evolved this evidence is overwhelming at this point we're learning more and more as the gaps are closing and one of the gaps in the geography of this part of ethiopia is between the lucy site and the arti site you might be wondering what's going on there well you're going to find out now from dr. Silesia Simao of Indiana University who runs a project known as the gonna project you know about the Lucy project and the Rd project you probably haven't heard as much about the gonna project Silesia is the only archeologist in today's symposium but he's been forbidden to talk at least talk very much about archaeology because stone tools material culture don't start until about 2.7 million years ago and dr. Simao is the scientist who demonstrated that and found the world's oldest stone tools it turns out though that those stone tools are about halfway through a sequence in the gonna study area that goes from quite young deposits to very very old deposits of the same age that Johannes was speaking so Silesia is going to take us through that wonderful new succession it is really exciting research and we're all privileged to have him here dr. Sally she's a mouth thank you very much Tim for the clear introduction all my colleagues have seen me always talk about the oldest tonsils from Ghana which I love to talk about and I'm not going to talk about those today today I would like to talk about the earliest hominids which is the theme of the conference here professor Michele brunette admission to sites in East Africa that are late miocene there are only two Ghana is also has also late miocene hominids and it's a Sun site in East Africa with late miocene hominids the older stone tools were found prior to 1999 in 1999 the gonna project started as a large multi disciplinary study and we moved from the younger deposits to the older deposits and we did find two major how many discoveries in the holder deposits in the late miocene dated to more than 500 million years ago and Ardipithecus ramidus originally found in the middle awash study area and then also at Ghana in deposits dated between four and a half to four point three million years ago the gold a study area is located north of the middle awash study area where a large number of RTP Turkish era meters fossils and also kadavo were found west of the famous site of Lucy Haddad and south of Warren sawmill a where dr. Riley Johannes Ellison lossy works this is the GU Nepali anthropology study area on the the oldest one to localities are right here on the eastern part of the study area after 1999 after I finished my dissertation work with all the stone tools we started surveying west and south southwest the deposits down here are much younger they go to the later part of the Pleistocene as you go up here and west the deposits have been uplifted and we have four and a half million year old soil formations about here where we find where we have Ardipithecus ramidus and then as we move further west we have even older deposits going back to six million years ago where we have just a few dentition attributed to Ardipithecus Kodama the gwm levels are for the ghana western margin sites where we have Ardipithecus ramidus four and a half to four point three million years and ESC means escarpment for the hardy Pittacus Kidada sites for the older sites just to give you a feel of what these sites look like I have red arrow to show there are a bunch of people doing survey in there it's a very huge area but unfortunately I am sure it is the same in the middle our study area where they survey and search for attribute occurs cadaver this area is covered with vegetation so you can as you can see here just a close-up so you will be lucky to find exposures that are for silly for us where you can find whole minutes and phone some areas like this one just a little bit the sparse vegetation but a lot of for now you can see project members doing survey the area is covered also with gravels and carbons and for cents they don't have really much time to survive in this kind of situation so yeah to be there right time we'll be really lucky this small spot is just one of the isolated T is attributed to articles cadaver found in this area and when we find fossils we collect all the gravels and cobbles will crawl shoulder-to-shoulder and pick every fossil bone to be a letter investigated to make sure that we are not missing any fossil bones because as you go further back in time going to the poses that are older than five million years ago pretty much what you find out just dentition as shown by dr. LS l acid there are just bits and pieces of the post crania the fosters below the neck found from this time period and in those regards professor Michelle Brule is lucky to find to my in deposits that are close to seven billion years ago and all combined these are the fossil dentition that we found from Ghana which are dated somewhere between five point eight to five point two million years ago conservatively I would say about five hundred million years just the Forrester's specimens from the middle hours which dr. Alistair Lacey just talked about I just put them here to for for comparison we have more or less the same specimens in terms of dentition how do you know how old they are there are soil formations right above stratigraphically above the areas where we found this tears and one of the areas called Balewa who have a complex of tougher sheis exposures in that area dated to about 5.4 million years so that's a minimum age for the fossils we have from the gonna study area and another site called both Delhi where we have facilities attributed to Kadapa a calf at officious exposure found below this C feet have is dated to six and a half million years we don't have thousands that go all the way to six and a half but the oldest we believe could be somewhere around five point seven five point six but conservatively I would say five hundred million years this is a Bodell a close-up of the tough that was related to six point four eight and even closer look down here and we have more than half a dozen volcanic ashes that were dated in the entire sequence going from something dated about 5.2 all the way down to six point four eight from buidling all right this is about it for the late miocene discoveries that we made at Ghana the Western margin from the middle hours also extends north into the gonna study area and we also have fossil hominids assigned to Ardipithecus ramidus at ghana and this is the first area we did survey in 1999 and just the first day from company it took us almost half a day to drive to this area and you are going up the deposits as you go up because of the uplifting are much older than where we do archeology which is my speciality so the first day we get there we found this mandible and it was found by the great fossil fossil finder at Ghana and far enough are named as a hobbit and we continued the 2000-2001 and we started finding more usually dentition and there is a lot of work involved saving and building done to keep the fossils from eroding and getting lost you know when we come next year and all in all by about 2004 2005 we had these fossils including the one we found in 1999 and also phalanges toe bones which show bipedality also from Ghana and the dating below where we found Hardy Pittacus Ramirez forces at gröna we have a fossil a volcanic ash dated to four point four seven a maximum age for the Gullah Ardipithecus ramidus about 4.5 it's a close up of the data tough right here we don't have good minimum age but based on paleomagnetic profiles the minimum age for the ghola Ardipithecus ramidus is 4.3 and we have two volcanic ashes dated to 4.5 close to 4.5 and so the gonna Ardipithecus ramidus updated between 4.3 to 4.5 million years and gora is only other site that has both Ardipithecus ramidus Kodama and at laviticus are emitters ramidus and this was published in 2005 in nature and we did continue after 2005 this is one very important Ardipithecus ramidus side we did find a complete upper jaw from this area which is awaiting publication again the it was found by Assad this is boozy diva River and the site is located just behind the hill here just early the morning a certain found this smaller he showed it to me we stopped the car we walked in there and this is a site we found a lot of associated molars which we will be publishing very soon so in conclusion outside of the middle hours Bona is only other site where we have the earliest hominids including Ardipithecus Kidada about five and half million years or older and Ardipithecus ramidus between four point five four point three million years ago and I will be talking a little bit about the older stone tools in the public talk tomorrow not today thank you very much thank you very much dr. Celeste for those of us who've been working in this field for some time this is illuminating a period of time that we had no data from it was a complete black hole until just 10-15 years ago and it's due to the hard work of people like Silesia and his crew that were really gaining knowledge into the biology of what these hominids were like before three and a half million years ago we can learn a lot more for them from them if we squeeze them hard so please come back where you'll learn about their teeth and their heads and their hands you

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Keywords: hominids, CARTA, Ethiopia

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Length: 57min 40sec (3460 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 10 2011

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Paleoanthropologists Michel Brunet, Yohannes Haile-Selassie and Sileshi Semaw present their insights into the origins of the earliest Hominids. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny"