Ann Gibbons - The First Human

CONTENTS

PART ONE
ANCIENT FOOTSTEPS

PART TWO
THE DECADE OF DISCOVERY

PART THREE
WISDOM OF THE BONES

It has been said, that the love of the chase is an inherent delight in mana relic of an instinctive passion.

CHARLES DARWIN
Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle

THE FOSSIL HUNTERS

Berhane Asfaw

Ethiopian biological anthropologist; coleader of the Middle Awash Research Group; director of the Rift Valley Research Services in Ethiopia.

Alain Beauvilain

French geographer who coordinated logistics and surveys for the Mission Paloanthropologique Franco-Tchadienne (MPFT) in Chad from 1994 until late 2002; lecturer at the University of Paris XNanterre.

Michel Brunet

French paleontologist; leader of the Mission Paloanthropologique Franco-Tchadienne (MPFT) that discovered Touma and Abel; professor at the University of Poitiers in France.

Desmond Clark

British-born archaeologist who was head of the first Berkeley team to explore the Middle Awash; professor emeritus at Berkeley when he died in February 2002.

Yves Coppens

French paleoanthropologist who was a codiscoverer of fossils of Lucys species in Ethiopia; collaborator with Michel Brunet and Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut; professor at the Collge de France in Paris.

Raymond Dart

Australian-born anatomist who discovered the first fossil of a human ancestor from Africa, from Taung, South Africa, in 1925. He died in 1988.

Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye

Chadian student at the University of NDjamena who discovered the skull of Touma on July 19, 2001; member of the Mission Paloanthropologique Franco-Tchadienne (MPFT).

Eugne Dubois

Dutch anatomist and paleontologist who discovered the first fossils of a hominid, Java man, in 1890 in Java, Indonesia. He died in 1940 in the Netherlands.

Eustace Gitonga

Kenyan artist; director of the Community Museums of Kenya, the organization that obtained permits for Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut to do research in the Tugen Hills.

Yohannes Haile-Selassie

Ethiopian paleoanthropologist who discovered the partial skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus and fossils of Ardipithecus kadabba in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia; member of the Middle Awash Research Group; curator of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Andrew Hill

British-born geologist; director of the Baringo Paleontological Research Project in the Tugen Hills of Kenya; chairman of the anthropology department at Yale University.

Clark Howell

American paleoanthropologist; coleader of the Omo Expedition to Ethiopia in 1966; professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

Donald Johanson

American paleoanthropologist who discovered Lucys skeleton in 1974. He is the director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Jon Kalb

American geologist; member of the first French-American team to explore Hadar, in 1971; leader of the first team to find fossils of a hominid in the Middle Awash; research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

Louis Leakey

Pioneer British, Kenyan-born anthropologist and paleontologist who established East Africa as a critical place for finding human ancestors; codiscoverer of Zinj in 1959; director of the Coryndon Museum (now the National Museums of Kenya). He died in 1972.

Mary Leakey

British-born illustrator and self-trained paleontologist who found the skull of Zinj in 1959 at Olduvai, Tanzania. She died in 1996.

Meave Leakey

Welsh-born zoologist whose team found fossils of Australopithecus anamensis at Kanapoi; retired director of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya.

Richard Leakey

Kenyan paleontologist; former director of the National Museums of Kenya; visiting professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York.

Bryan Patterson

British-born paleontologist who discovered fossils of early hominids in the mid-1960s at Kanapoi and Lothagam; professor at Harvard University. He died in 1979.

Martin Pickford

British-born geologist who discovered fossils of Millennium Man in the Tugen Hills; coleader of the Kenya Paleontology Expedition; geologist at the Collge de France in Paris.

David Pilbeam

British-born paleoanthropologist whose team discovered fossils of Ramapithecus in Pakistan; professor of anthropology at Harvard University.

Vincent Sarich

American molecular anthropologist; professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Brigitte Senut

French paleontologist who discovered fossils of Millennium Man in the Tugen Hills; coleader of the Kenya Paleontology Expedition; professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Elwyn Simons

American primate biologist who proposed Ramapithecus as an early hominid in the 1960s; professor of biological anthropology, anatomy, and zoology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Gen Suwa

Japanese paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossil of Ardipithecus ramidus, in Ethiopia; associate professor at the University Museum, the University of Tokyo, in Japan.

Maurice Taieb

French geologist who discovered the fossil beds at Hadar where Lucy was found and in the Middle Awash where Ardipithecus was found; director of research emeritus for CNRS-CEREGE laboratory in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Alan Walker

British-born paleontologist who found fossils of Australopithecus anamensis at Allia Bay, Kenya; professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.

Tim White

American paleoanthropologist; coleader of the Middle Awash Research Group; professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Giday WoldeGabriel

Ethiopian geologist; coleader of the Middle Awash Research Group; geologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.