Ethiopia Afar better place to find ancient human remains

About 950 BC, the Queen of Sheba ruled over the rich forested Ethiopian kingdom of Ophir. Before hooking up with King Solomon in Israel, the queen shipped him great cargoes of gold, silver, pearls, sandalwood, ivory, peacocks and apes.

You wouldn’t recognise her kingdom today. It has been reduced to a hot, barren, snakeand scorpion-infested wasteland called the Afar Desert. Only a few warlike farmers and nomads live in this desert, armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-grenade launchers.

But the Afar Desert has plenty of visitors in the form of fossilhunters looking for ancient prehuman bones. That’s because US anthropologist Donald Johanson discovered 40 per cent of a famous female skeleton there in 1974.

She was a missing link between an ape and a human. Her scientific name is Pithecanthropus afarensis meaning a ‘‘monkey-human from Afar’’ but, because the Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was played a lot around Johanson’s field camp, he dubbed the skeleton ‘‘Lucy’’.

Lucy was only 1.1-metres tall. From the waist up she looked like a chimpanzee but her legs were longer than chimps, she walked upright and her feet were more like human feet. She died about 3.1 million years ago.

After Johanson’s discovery, many American and European fossil-hunters flocked to the Afar Desert and, over the years, found many more bone fragments and teeth, but no skeletons.

More recently a number of Ethiopians have qualified at prestigious foreign universities, returning to their own country to lead most expeditions. They have been very successful. Among the Ethiopian teams is Yohannes Hailie-Selassi (no relation). He says his team sometimes crawls shoulder-to-shoulder across the scorching Afar in search of fossils.

Convinced of their great scientific importance, the Ethiopian Government has built a new facility for storing ancient finds in the capital, Addis Ababa.

The five-storey building holds about 250,000 stone tools and ancient bones, including 11 species of near-humans discovered in the last two decades. So proud were they of Lucy that, in 2007, the Ethiopian Government sent her skeleton on a 10-city tour of the United States. Today, Lucy is back in her vault in Addis Ababa.

You’d think that after 45 years of close study everything would be known about Lucy. But last month Texan and Ethiopian scientists announced an unlikely discovery.

Looking closely at her bones, the paleontologists noticed many of them were broken. Compressive forces had fractured many of her leg bones and forced them into each other and the neck of her femur had been snapped off. Her pelvis, arm bones and most major joints were broken.

The team suggests that Lucy died when she fell from a tall tree, landing feet first, twisting on to her left side before falling on her face. Her shoulder blade was probably broken when she stretched her arm to break her fall.

Critics claim that there’s no tree tall enough to inflict those injuries. She must have dropped from an aeroplane.