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Three and a half years ago, Southern Connecticut University anthropologist Michael Rogers unearthed a few flakes of stone mixed with animal bones at the site of the Gona (Ethiopia) Paleoanthropological Research Project.
Working as part of an international research team led by Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian anthropologist working at IU’s CRAFT Research Center, the subsequent report by the team in last August’s Journal of Human Evolution had the media, well, hungry for more. Discover News referred to the find as “the world’s oldest kitchen.”
The fact that early humans’ use of tools 2.6 million years ago to provide food for themselves also suggested that early hominids were developing from a purely vegetarian bunch to one that was, at the very least, partly carnivorous. Semaw, as principal investigator, was quoted in the New York Times in October, and suggested the find was evidence of an enriched diet, which, over time, led evolutionarily to a larger brain.
Gona, in Ethiopia’s Awash Valley, is adjacent to Hadar, where “Lucy,” perhaps the most famous hominid fossil because of its highly preserved state, was found in 1974.
Semaw has been conducting research in the same region for more than a decade.
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