I love Lucy....man oh man.....why else would this be so important for them???  In general......if you want to see how something spread out.....it is very important to find from where it spread out.......if u found out that Central Africa was the beg. of human civilization.....it would be far easier to see how it changed over time.....and differed from place to place......as in....how and why are the people in China different from those in India..........the Americas, etc......

And if u found the Ishango bone....which was a math document......culture, learning.....the chances something similar around there is fairly good.....i am understating this so u racist idiots understand it........and, again, sheer proximity.....Uganda and the dem. rep of the Congo are right next to Ethiopia and Tanzania, etc......

History of Discovery

In his 1871 book entitled The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin speculated that fossils of the earliest humans and their immediate progenitors ultimately would be found somewhere in Africa.  He based this on the fact that the natural range of our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, is limited to Africa.  He concluded that we ultimately must have shared a now extinct common ancestor with those apes in Africa.  This view was mostly rejected by the scientific world of the time.  Before the 1920's, knowledge of our fossil ancestors only went back to the Neandertals  in Europe and some presumably earlier human-like forms from Java, in Southeast Asia.  Few researchers were willing to estimate the time period of the earliest hominins at much more than 100,000 years, and there was no inkling of anything older from Africa.  In addition, there was a bias among the predominantly European paleoanthropologists against accepting early Africans as the ancestors of all humanity.

Raymond Dart  (1893-1989)

"Taung child" reconstruction   (Australopithecus africanus)

In 1924, Raymond Dart, an Australian anatomy professor at the University of Witerwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, obtained a fossil skull that had been blasted out of a nearby limestone quarry at Taung .  It took him 73 days to chisel the skull free from its surrounding stone matrix and 4 years of spare time to free the jaw and the fossilized brain.  However, long before then, Dart recognized the importance of this find.  In 1925 he named it Australopithecus africanus (literally "southern ape from Africa").  Because of its small size, he called it the "Taung baby."  In fact, its teeth indicate that it was a 3-4 year old child.  Despite its relatively small brain, he concluded that this species was intermediate between apes and humans.  He based this mainly on the shape and position of the base of the brain cast.  It indicated that the foramen magnum , or hole in the skull through which the spinal cord passes, pointed downward and was nearly at the central balance point of the skull.  This meant that the Taung child must have been bipedal.  In addition, the canine teeth were relatively short.  In both of these traits, the Taung child was much more like a human than an ape.  Most paleoanthropologists in the 1920's rejected Dart's claims that Australopithecus africanus was intermediate between apes and humans in favor of the view that it was just an ape.  Dart's claims were not widely accepted until the late 1940's.

Robert Broom (1866-1951)

Following Dart's discovery, several other caves were investigated in South Africa.  Most of the work was done by Robert Broom from 1936 through the 1940's.  Broom was a medical doctor and an enthusiastic amateur paleontologist from Scotland.  In 1903, he was appointed professor of geology at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and became internationally respected for his studies of early mammal-like reptiles.  His insistence on the correctness of the theory of evolution led to his dismissal from this conservative religious university in 1910.  Consequently, he returned to being a medical doctor in a rural town in South Africa but continued paleontological research in his spare time.  In 1934, at the age of 68, he retired from his medical practice and joined the staff of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria as a paleoanthropologist.  The rest of his life was spent searching for early hominin fossils.   

Robert Broom's most important discoveries were made in the Sterkfontein valley of South Africa.  It was there in 1936 that he found the first known adult Australopithecus africanus while excavating in Sterkfontein  cave.  In 1938, he discovered more fossil remains of africanus and other early hominins in Kromdraai  cave.  Some of these fossils were larger boned and more muscular with powerful jaws.  Broom named them Paranthropus robustus  (Paranthropusmeans "parallel to man").  Significantly, these robust hominins also differed in having a sagittal crest , or ridge of bone extending from front to back, along the midline of the top of the skull.  A sagittal crest serves as an anchor attachment for exceptionally large, strong jaw muscles.  This skeletal feature is also present in large apes but not in africanus or humans.

Australopithecus africanus				Paranthropus robustus

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NOTE:  Some paleoanthropologists lump Paranthropus robustus and other paranthropoids into the genus Australopithecus.  They consider them to be a physically robust subgroup of australopithecines.

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In 1948, Robert Broom found more paranthropoid fossils at Swartkrans  cave in South Africa.  Following that excavation, he dedicated the rest of his life to writing everything known about all of the early hominins.  He completed this compendium work in 1951.  He was 85 years old and ill.  As he finally finished his writing, he reportedly said "now it is done and so am I."  He died a few minutes later.

	Leopard canines fit  punctures in hominin  skull from Swartkrans

Between 1965 and 1983, Swartkrans cave was carefully reinvestigated by another South African paleoanthropologist, C. K. Brain, using more thorough field and laboratory techniques than had been used by Robert Broom a generation earlier.  Many thousands of bone fragments, including the remains of 130 individual hominins, were recovered by Brain.  These bones were from australopithecines and paranthropoids as well as early members of our genus, Homo.  Because many of the bones had chewing marks and at least one of the skulls had peculiar depressions reminiscent of punctures made by the canine teeth of a leopard, Brain hypothesized that some of the Swartkrans hominins had been eaten by these big cats.  The early hominin fossil-bearing strata in the cave also contained 195 stones that were from locations distant from the cave.  Brain believed that 30 of them may have been used as tools or weapons.  In any case, the presence of these stones suggests that not all of the early hominins in the cave were there as a result of being the victims of carnivores.

Unfortunately, most of the South African sites where early hominin fossils have been found are not easily dated because they lack association with volcanic deposits that would readily allow radiometric dating.  That is not the case with most of the early hominin sites in East Africa.

The oldest fossil hominins have been recovered from sites in East Africa, especially in the Great Rift Valley.  One of the most important sites there is Olduvai Gorge .  It is an approximately 30 mile (48 km.) long, eroded canyon complex cutting into the Serengeti  Plain in Northern Tanzania.  It is only about 295 feet (90 m.) deep, but its neatly stratified layers of dirt and rock interspersed with easily datable volcanic ash and lava layers cover the last 2.1 million years of geological and evolutionary history.  The remains of many australopithecines, paranthropoids, and early humans have been found at Olduvai.  When these ancient hominins lived there, it was a lake margin grassland area that had abundant plant food and meat sources that could be exploited by scavenging.  

Mary and Louis Leakey with the "Zinjanthropus boisei"palate and a modern human skull in 1959

	Zinjanthropus boisei (Paranthropus boisei)

Early hominin fossils from Olduvai Gorge are known mostly as a result of the many expeditions of Louis and Mary Leakey.  Louis began searching there in 1931, and his second wife Mary joined him in 1935.  However, it was not until 1959 that they found their first early hominin fossil.  Louis gave it a new genus and species designation, Zinjanthropus boisei (literally "East African man").  Subsequently, it was recognized to be only a super robust paranthropoid.  It is now generally referred to as Paranthropus boisei .  Using the then new potassium-argon dating method, the fossil was determined to be 1.75 ± .25 million years old.  This was a startlingly early date when it was made public in 1959.  Louis Leakey andZinjanthropus instantly became international media stars, and both of their pictures were on the front page of newspapers around the world.  Louis was also the focus of several television documentary programs.  In the years after his death in 1972, Mary became well known as a paleoanthropologist in her own right.

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NOTE:  Louis Leakey gave his Zinjanthropus find the species name boisei in honor of Charles Boise, a wealthy American who funded fieldwork by the Leakeys. 

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In 1974, a team of paleoanthropologists, under the direction of an American, Donald Johanson, found an even more ancient species of australopithecine at the Hadar site in the Afar  Desert region of Northern Ethiopia.  It was a 40% complete skeleton of an adult female whom they named Lucy.  She had been only 3 feet 3 inches (1 m.) tall with a slender body weighing only about 60 pounds (27 kg.).  She lived 3.2-3.18 million years ago.  Johanson concluded that Lucy was from a different species than had been previously discovered.   He classified her as an Australopithecus afarensis  (named for the Afar region).  Many other specimens of this species and later ones were found in Ethiopia since 1974, but none is as complete as Lucy.