A set of Homo sapien fossils discovered in Ethiopia in the 1960s, known as Omo I, are now thought to be several thousand years older after a new volcanic ash analysis.
Ethiopia's Kibish Formation was home to some of the earliest human ancestors, due to its rich volcanic topography and soils.fossils from eastern Africa back to more than 230,000 years.sandwiched between layers of volcanic ash in Ethiopia in the late 1960s. Previous estimates dated the fossils to around 197,000 years old.
Discovered in the 1960s, these skulls from the Omo River in Ethiopia are among the oldest human fossils known.Nonetheless, the rift valley would have been an appealing place to live during this era, as it was filled with lakes and woodlands. The volcanoes would have created fertile soil and plenty of obsidian rock to craft into tools. The valley “provided resources for the species to thrive,” Vidal says.
It’s difficult to determine the age of poorly preserved bones directly, Vidal says. Instead, researchers have investigated Omo I’s surrounding environment. Earlier efforts have focused on a layer of volcanic ash near but not above or below the fossils, which yielded an age just under 200,000 years old. “But the big uncertainty is the position of this ash layer relative to the fossils,” Vidal says.
More tantalizing is a six-foot-thick layer of ash not far above the sediments that encased Omo I. This deposit is clearly somewhat younger than the fossils that lie beneath it, but pinning down its age has proven challenging. The material has a consistency like flour, making it too fine for scientists to analyze using a technique calledHowever, they could determine the composition of the ash. “Every volcanic deposit has its own fingerprint, its own chemical signature,” Vidal says.
Vidal and her collaborators tackled this question by investigating major volcanic eruptions that took place in Ethiopia from 300,000 to 60,000 years ago. “The broader significance of this project was to figure whether those big eruptions had an impact on the evolution and migration patterns of the
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