By Shiferaw Lakew
Yohannes Haile-Selassie is a well-known Ethiopian paleoanthropologist and authority on pre-Homo sapiens hominids. He is the Director of Institute of Human Origins at the Arizona State University and Professor of Human Evolution and Social Change.
He was approached by the Addis Dialogue program on EBC World, asking for some of his views on the overall origin of humanity.
He said people tend to ask where they come from and as such, they might be able to go to seven generations and then it gets blurred as they cannot know who came before that.
So, this is a question of who gave rise to people’s great ancestors. Societies have their own way of identifying their origins regarding where ancestors come from, he said. But from the scientific point of view, scientists try to reconstruct past ancient fossils that they recover from different sites, like Ethiopia.
Giving us a rundown of ancient human ancestors, he elucidated that, in terms of the general origin of humanity, scientists think that human ancestors originated somewhere between six and seven million years ago according to the current evidence available.
Ethiopia has yielded six-million-year-old human ancestors known as Ardipithecus kadabba, which is somewhere between 5.2 and 6.2 million years. This at the root of humanity.
“As we get younger, starting from there, 4.4 million years ago, we have a species called Ardipithecus ramidus, and one of the iconic specimens like Lucy, nicknamed Ardi, comes from the species Ardipithecus ramidus. Ardis is about 4.4 million years ago, and as you get younger to 4.2, we have another species called Australopithecus anamensis. This species gave rise to Lucy species between 3.8 and 3 million years,” he said.
This clearly shows how the record is complete all the way from six million years to Lucy’s times. At the end of which, we have other species including our own genus, the Genus Homo, according to the paleoanthropologist.
He added, “So we have the earliest evidence of Homo from about 2.8 million years ago in the Afar Rift from a site called Ledi-Geraru announced about seven or eight years ago. This is where we see how complete the record is. We have seen the record is very complete before 3 million years. As soon as our genus originated at 2.8 million years ago, we have lower jaw recovered in 2015 which represents the earliest representative of our Genus. At 2.3 million years ago, we have homo Habilis from Hadar where Lucy was found.”
As you get younger, he goes on to elaborate, you come to Homo Erectus, known from the Middle Awash, from one million year ago.
All of these specimens are associated with the Afar Rift indicating how rich the Afar Rift is when it comes to fossils of human ancestors. As people get younger, it gets us to our own beginning, people who look like us. Thus, takes us to the Omo Basin in Southern Ethiopia.
So, to sum it up, Ethiopia is not only the origin of the modern humans that live today, but it goes back all the way to the root of our origins about 6 million years ago, according to Professor Yohannes Haile-Selassie, who added, “So when you look at the record, it is a complete record that spans the last 6 million years. No other country has that kind of complete possible record to make us understand where we came from, how we got here.”
This shows Ethiopia is indeed the true cradle of humanity. This is what makes Ethiopia unique in that “We discovered 22 human fossils of which 13 fossil remains in Africa. Among 13 species from the past 4 Fossil species are found only in Ethiopia.” Professor Yohannes told that it is scientifically proved.
Here is the link to the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoHDXHZzVVc