On November 24 1974, renowned American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson spotted “a piece of elbow with humanlike anatomy” poking out of a rocky hillside in northern Ethiopia. It was the first fossil of a partial skeleton belonging to “Lucy”, an ancient female hominin who took the story of human evolution back beyond 3 million years for the first time.
This autumn also marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the “Taung child”, a fossilised skull in South Africa that was key in our understanding that ancient humans first evolved in Africa – something we now take for granted.
Read more: The whole story of human evolution – from ancient apes via Lucy to us
Yet, despite largely centring on the African continent as the “cradle of mankind”, the narrative of hominin fossil discovery is striking for its lack of African scientists. In this week’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, and in a Q&A for our Insights series, leading Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie explains why the story of ancient human origins is so western-centric, and why this needs to change.
Haile-Selassie says that many of the fossils that made western scientists famous were actually discovered by local Africans, who were only acknowledged at the end of a scientific publication:
For a long time, African scholars were never part of telling the human story; nor could they actively participate in the analysis of the fossils they found. Up to the 1990s, long after Lucy was found, we were only present in the form of labourers and fossil hunters.
Haile-Selassie is now director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University in the US. In the decades after Lucy’s discovery, he was responsible for some of the most remarkable ancient human fossil finds in his home country of Ethiopia, including that of Ardipithecus kadabba in 1997. He recalls that memorable moment:
Part of the jaw was just lying there on the surface. Deep inside, something immediately told me I had found the earliest human ancestor – more than 5 million years old. The thought made me go numb for a few seconds … Literally, no hominin fossils from that age had ever been discovered before.
But Haile-Selassie warns that for research to continue unearthing such important fossils in Ethiopia and across Africa, a major change in the support for African institutions and scientists is needed – in order to “decolonise paleoanthropology”:
[To make] progress in the future, African paleosciences has to be one of the agenda items that we need to talk about. Without that, we just can’t continue making progress in Ethiopia or in Tanzania or in Kenya or in South Africa, right? It cannot be dominated like the old days by foreign researchers.
Such increased support, he says, could lead to important discoveries in parts of Africa that, to date, have not yielded ancient hominin fossils:
There are so many areas in Africa that haven’t been explored … Now, people are thinking about exploring West Africa for human ancestors. They might end up finding fossils in there as well … And that’s why we need to have a firm foundation established, so the next generation [of African scientists] doesn’t have to deal with the lack of infrastructure that we [faced].
On the other hand, Haile-Selassie warns that lack of western investment in African institutions could lead to restrictions being imposed on future exploration. He suggests countries in Africa may “make their antiquity flows tighter” in terms of who is allowed to research there in future.
Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear an interview with Yohannes Haile-Selassie by Mike Herd, Insights editor at The Conversation.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced and written by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
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