When it comes to ancient fossils, especially when it comes to Homo sapiens, this is very doubtful. In the sense that nothing is clear. Now, if I said that we will remember the oldest, I must find an explanation. For a few years, not so many, news continued to appear that 300,000-year-old sapien fossils, the oldest in the world, had been discovered in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. We will not talk about them today, because, between us, they concern not only Homo sapiens.

It is much more likely that we are talking about archaic individuals who make a hypothetical transition to our species. Just a hypothetical, because like I said, nothing is clear. Therefore, we will recall the famous fossils from Ethiopia, from the Omo River Valley, which have become emblematic and which for decades have told us that our species appeared approximately 200,000 years ago in East Africa.

The history of the valley of the Omo River, at least as far as we are concerned, that is, the fossil part, begins somewhere around 1901-1902, when the French aristocrat Robert Bour de Bozas conducted the first explorations there. About 30 years later, based on these notes, paleontologist Camille Arambour, also French, went to the area. A man collected several tons of fossils, took them to Paris, sorted and examined them until he could no longer, only to find that there were no human traces among them.

Similarly, the American paleoanthropologist Clark Howell traveled to Ethiopia in 1959, he also collected a bunch of fossils, only to find himself with them confiscated by the authorities, because apparently man missed one detail, which was to get permission. Well, that was the beginning.

The situation changed in the early 1960s, when the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, decided that it was necessary to put his country on the map with the help of archeology. It so happened that during an official dinner in Tanzania, Selassie approached the great Kenyan-British archaeologist and pre-historian Louis Leakey and asked him to come dig in Ethiopia. He should have been paid royally and provided with absolutely all the necessary resources.

It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. The problem was that Louis was so sick with arthritis that he could barely walk, so he made a counter offer. He did not come, but sent his son Richard. Now everyone knows that Richard Leakey was a titan of science by profession. What is less well known is that science took hold of it much later, not least when his father sent him to find the hooves of dead horses in Ethiopia.

To give you the clearest idea of ​​what he was like then, we will say that Richard Leakey was about 23 years old, left school at the age of 16, passionately hated archeology and everything his parents, the famous prehistorians Louis and Mary, did. The guy opened a small local business, organized safaris in East Africa, chased young tourists, had fun, things like that. I mean, I repeat, the man was 23 years old, what would you want him to do? Go to the monastery? Finally! In short, he was to lead an Ethiopian research expedition.

A bit more intellectual, his father pulled the strings and managed to convince the Ethiopians to bring both Kamila Arambour, who is already past 80 years old, and the previously mentioned Clark Howell to the team. People had been there before, they also had experience in research activities, just good to fill in what the younger one lacked. Well, this is where the fun begins.

Briefly, this expedition consisted of three teams: the French Arambourg, the American under the leadership of Howell, and the Kenyan-British under the leadership of Leakey. They shared a huge territory, hundreds of square kilometers, and everyone did their own thing so as not to step on each other’s toes. Despite their efforts, the French and Americans found nothing. Instead, Richard Leakey went head-to-head, head-to-head, and invented human fossils on the first try. Please, they were not discovered by him, but by a Kenyan partner, Kamoya Kimeu, who was also his business partner.

However, a later published study strangely mentions that the original location of the fossils is “uncertain”. Somehow they found them, but they didn’t know exactly where. Moreover, approx. Who knows what stone material they didn’t find to say you associated them with some distinct material culture. Overall, in several expeditions conducted during that period, 1968-1972, Leakey’s team discovered one skull (Omo I), fragments of a second (Omo II), and the highly fragmented remains of a third.

Ah, these skulls were found miles apart. In addition, they differed morphologically, as if they belonged to species separated by hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, Omo I looks remarkably modern by the standards of 200,000 years ago, while Omo II swears it’s Homo erectus. This is exactly what Richard Leakey indicated in the initial report that the fossils belonged to the species H. erectus. Finally.

Since there were no known dating methods in the 60s and 70s, they estimated the age of the fossils to be about 130,000 years old, which was still huge considering that at the time no one believed in human remains older than 60 000-100,000 years. Everyone was happy, led by Emperor Selassie I, who saw his mission accomplished. Ethiopia has just become the cradle of humanity.

The site in question was so important, and the fossils there so changed the paradigm of human evolution, that no one looked for it for about 40 years. Which is very strange. The known dating, according to which the human remains at Omo are about 200,000 years old, was made only 30 years after the discovery. And not directly on fossils, but at the level of sedimentary rocks, where they are supposed to have been discovered. Research in the area was not resumed until 2000, but they did not produce impressive results.

Meanwhile, as you know, everything developed. Israel, for example, offered fossils of Homo sapiens (they are actually sapiens) recorded at the same age, about 200,000 years. Through China it will be around the same time, but they are not talked about much because… they are from China. Ah, so that it would still be good and there would be no chaos in the hierarchy, from this year, i.e. 2022, the Ethiopian remains have been moved. More recent, they are 233,000 years old.

Now I wanted you not to misunderstand. I did not allude to the mentioned fossils. No! What I had to say, I said directly. No one disputes Leakey’s discovery, but one cannot pretend that there are not many white threads in this whole story. I told you, I didn’t give boiling water!

Bibliography

• Brown, F.H., Fuller, C.R., 2008, Stratigraphy and tephra of the Kibish Formation, southwestern Ethiopia, Journal of Human Evolution, no. 55 (3), p. 366-403

• Leakey REF, Butzer KW, Day MH, 1969, Early remains of Homo sapiens from the Omo River region of southwestern Ethiopia, Nature, no. 222, p. 1132–1138

• MacDougall, I., Brown, F.H., Flagl, J.G., 2005, Stratigraphic placement and age of modern humans from Kibish, Ethiopia, Nature, no. 433 (7027), p. 733-736

• Meredith M., 2011, Born in Africa: The Search for the Origins of Human Life, PublicAffairs Editorial, 288 pages.

• Morel V., 1996, Passions of the Ancestors: The Leakey Family and the Search for the Origins of Humanity, ed. Touchstone, 640 pages.

• Shea, JJ, 2008, Middle Stone Age archeology of the Kibish Formation of the Lower Omo Valley: Excavations, stone assemblages, and hypotheses about the behavior of early Homo sapiens, Journal of Human Evolution, no. 55, p. 448-485

• Vidal CM, Lane CS, Asfawossen A. et al., 2022, Age of the earliest known Homo sapiens from eastern Africa, Nature, vol. 601, p. 579-5