IU group's discovery a link to the past

An archaeologist based at IU's Stone Age Institute and Center for Research into the Anthropological Foundations of Technology is leading a group of researchers who recently found the nearly complete cranium of an early human ancestor in Gawis, Ethiopia. Sileshi Semaw's group is part of ongoing research in the Gona Paleoanthropological \nResearch Project area, which began in Ethiopia in 1999.\n"These are the crown jewels of human origin studies," said Nicholas Toth, co-director of the Stone Age Institute and CRAFT Research Center. Only about a dozen full skulls like this have been found, he added, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.\n"They'll probably find other parts of the skeleton," Toth added. "If you're really lucky, you might find a nearly complete skeleton, so it's one of the most productive fossil human study areas anywhere in the world today, and there's decades of work to be done there."\nProject scientists said the Gawis cranium provides humans with a link to a period of great change in their past, according to a press release. The skull has very different features from a modern human face, but scientists say there is no doubt the fossil is anatomically linked with humans.\nProject member Asahmed Humet found the complete cranium. Toth said it comes from a period 200,000 to 500,000 years ago. According to reports, Humet uncovered the skull, which includes the braincase, upper face and \nupper jaw, amid other fossils of stone tools and various animals like pigs, zebras and cats.\n"It's not always able to be known what your stone toolmakers look like," said Kathy Schick, co-director of the Stone Age Institute and CRAFT. "So it's very neat to tie in what the toolmaker looks like with what the actual tools look like."\nThe Gawis cranium comes from a period about which little is known. It is rare to find a complete skull, and this one -- dating to the time when African Homo erectus was transitioning into modern Homo sapiens -- provides a more complete look at the period, Toth said.\nGona team members are still working to determine a more precise age for the \nspecimen, as well as to trace its relation to other findings from the Pleistocene era. In the group's press release, Semaw said his team will continue its work and he said he believes it will make more discoveries in the years to come.\nSchick said the research being done by scientists in the area is important for the paleoanthropological field. The Gona site is a critical area in Africa that holds evidence for important stages of human evolution that can fill in the gaps in the information about certain periods, she said.\n"One thing indirectly, (is) it's always exciting to know that some of the cutting edge research is being done right out of your campus," Schick said. "It's nice to have IU stamped on the discovery, and we're very proud of being able to do this. Both the Stone Age Institute and Indiana University are the home base of this whole project."\nSchick added that she recently received an e-mail from a professor in England who is already incorporating this finding into the classroom. IU professors who have been part of the project in the past have used their experiences and discoveries to inject the flavor of reality into their lectures.\n"You never get tired of making discoveries like this," Schick said. "And it's a big event out in the field and then it's a ripple effect of people learning about it, and the discovery spreading throughout the world"