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Since 2000, significant collections of Latest Miocene hominin fossils have been recovered from Chad, Kenya, and Ethiopia. These fossils have provided a better understanding of earliest hominin biology and context. Here, we describe five hominin teeth from two periods (ca. 5.4 Million-years-ago and ca. 6.3 Ma) that were recovered from the Adu-Asa Formation in the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project area in the Afar, Ethiopia that we assign to either Hominina, gen. et sp. indet. or Ardipithecus kadabba. These specimens are compared with extant African ape and other Latest Miocene and Early Pliocene hominin teeth. The derived morphology of the large, non-sectorial maxillary canine and mandibular third premolar links them with later hominins and they are phenetically distinguishable and thus phyletically distinct from extant apes. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Although stone tools generally co-occur with early members of the genus Homo, they are rarely found in direct association with hominins. We report that both Acheulian and Oldowan artifacts and Homo erectus crania were found in close association at 1.26 million years (Ma) ago at Busidima North (BSN12), and ca. 1.6 to 1.5 Ma ago at Dana Aoule North (DAN5) archaeological sites at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia. The BSN12 partial cranium is robust and large, while the DAN5 cranium is smaller and more gracile, suggesting that H. erectus was probably a sexually dimorphic species. The evidence from Gona shows behavioral diversity and flexibility with a lengthy and concurrent use of both stone technologies by H. erectus, confounding a simple "single species/single technology" view of early Homo. Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).
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The Busidima Formation in the Afar region, Ethiopia, spans the Quaternary and records the cultural evolution of the genus Homo. Yet, the Middle Pleistocene to Holocene fluvial environments in which early humans lived are undersampled in eastern Africa. This paper examines the stratigraphy, geochronology and paleoenvironments of the newly designated Odele Member of the uppermost Busidima Formation (<152 thousand years ago (ka)), which has received little attention despite representing a critical period in the evolution of early Homo sapiens and its migration out of Africa. The Odele Member is 40–50 m thick and is dated using tephrochronology, radiometric, luminescence, and electron spin resonance techniques. The member spans 151 to 7 ka, defined at the base by the widespread Waidedo Vitric Tuff (WAVT, 151 ± 16 ka modeled age and 95.4% credible interval - C.I.). There are two prominent erosional unconformities in the Odele Member, a lower one after the WAVT deposition with a modeled 95.4% C.I. range of 124–97 ka; and an upper one involving widespread alluvial fan incision commencing between 21.7 and 12.9 ka. The uppermost Odele Member also contains black, organic-rich mats, redox features, reed casts, and freshwater gastropods marking wetter conditions during the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene. A black, fine-grained relict soil coeval with the Halalalee paleosol bounds the top of the Odele Member and has mollic and vertic properties, weathering since ∼12 ka. These incision events and prominent paleosol development near/at the top of the Busidima Formation document Middle to Late Pleistocene Awash River incision to its present-day course. Paleo-rainfall estimates suggest that the Early Holocene-age Halalalee paleosol weathered under a climate with mean annual rainfall 10–15% higher than today. A compilation of radiocarbon ages from aquatic gastropods, carbonized wood and charcoal from the upper Odele Member shows wetter and possibly more vegetated conditions during late marine isotope stage (MIS) 3 and the African Humid Period (AHP) that are tightly coupled with precession-driven summer insolation maxima. These key findings suggest that periods of incision, aggregation, and landscape stability in the Odele Member have an orbital precession pacing. The Odele Member revises upward the age of the Busidima Formation to 7 ka, showing that it spans into the Holocene and now includes Middle and Later Stone Age archaeological traditions.
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