We trudged out onto a cobbled, sunbaked pan, featureless but for a rough semicircle of basalt rocks. The cairn marked the spot where, on December 17, 1992, paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa of the University of Tokyo noticed an enigmatic molar peeking out of the ground. There was just enough detail on it to reveal it was hominid. A couple of days later near the same spot, fossil hunter Alemayehu Asfaw found a piece of a child’s jaw with a first molar tooth.That milk molar was like no other hominid baby tooth I’d ever seen, and I’d seen them all, White told me. Gen and I just looked at each other. We didn’t have to say anything. This was something way more primitive.The team set up a perimeter and began sweeping the area clean WoldeGabriel went to work on the geology He figured out that the hominid-bearing deposits were sandwiched between two volcanic ash layers, the Gaala (camel) tuff below and the Daam Aatu (baboon) tuff above The dates of these tuffs proved indistinguishable—44 million years for both This meant the volcanic eruptions had captured between them a focused lens of time—perhaps as little as a thousand years And everywhere the deposits outcropped along a five-and-a-half-mile arc, there were fossils—monkeys, antelope, rhinos, bears, birds, insects, fossilized wood, and other plant parts, even fossil dung beetle brood balls They called the place Aramis, the Afar name for a nearby dry streambed.
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