DR. ZERESENAY "ZERAY" ALEMSEGED

The arid badlands of Ethiopia's Afar region have long been a favorite hunting ground for paleoanthropologists. The area is perhaps best known for having yielded "Lucy", the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor known as Australopithecus afarensis. Now researchers have unveiled another incredible find, from a site called Dikika, just four kilometers from where Lucy turned up. It is the skeleton of an A. afarensis child who lived 3.3 million years ago. No other hominin of such antiquity — including Lucy — is as complete as this one. Moreover, as the earliest juvenile hominin ever found, the Dikika fossil provides a rare opportunity to study growth processes in our ancient relatives.
 
Fossil hunters led by paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, discovered the remains — believed to be those of a three-year-old girl — in 1999. Most of the upper part of the skeleton was entombed in sandstone when it was found. It has taken Alemseged five years to remove enough of the cement-like matrix to expose the key elements, and many more bones remain obscured by the sediment. Still, the specimen has already yielded precious insights into a species that most researchers agree gave rise to our own genus, Homo.

• Description of new hominin and non human primate fossils;
• Growth and development in early hominins;
• Application of new techniques, such as CT analysis to investigate internal and external structures hominin fossils;
• Analysis of environmental and ecological factors affecting primate and human evolutionary processes;