Middle Awash Afar Ethiopia

Details on the origins of all the peoples that make up the population of highland Ethiopia are still matters for research and debate in the early 1990s.

Anthropologists believe that East Africa's Great Rift Valley is the site of humankind's origins. (The valley traverses Ethiopia from southwest to northeast.)

In 1974 archaeologists excavating sites in the Awash River will valley discover three and a  half-million-year-old fossil skeletons, which they name Australopithecus afarensis.

These earliest known hominids stand upright, live in groups, and have adapted to living in open areas rather than in forests.

All humans originate from East Africa, according to the theory of recent African origin of modern humans, the position held within a majority of the scientific community.

Some of the earliest fossilized hominid remains have been found in East Africa, including those found in Awash Valley of Ethiopia, Koobi Fora in Kenya and Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Lucy, discovered in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar region, is considered the world's second oldest, but most complete and best preserved, adult Australopithecine fossil.

Lucy's taxonomic name, Australopithecus afarensis, means 'southern ape of Afar', and refers to the Ethiopian region where the discovery was made.

Lucy is estimated to have lived three point two million years ago.

There have been many other notable fossil findings in the country, including another early hominin, Ardipithicus ramidus (Ardi).

East Africa, and more specifically the general area of Ethiopia, is widely considered the site of the emergence of early Homo sapiens in the Middle Paleolithic.

The fossilized remains of Homo sapiens idaltu, an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens that lived almost one hundred and sixty thousand years ago in Pleistocene Africa, discovered at Herto Bouri in the Middle Awash site of Ethiopia's Afar Triangle in 1997 by Tim White, is first unveiled in 2003.

Herto Bouri is a region of Ethiopia under volcanic layers.

By using radioisotope dating, the layers date between one hundred and fifty-four thousand and one hundred and sixty thousand years old.

Idaltu is the Afar word for "elder, first born.”

These fossils differ from those of chronologically later forms of early H. sapiens such as Early European Modern Humans found in Europe and other parts of the world in that their morphology has many archaic features not typical of H. sapiens (although modern human skulls do differ across the globe).

Despite the archaic features, these specimens are postulated to represent the direct ancestors of Homo sapiens sapiens.

"Modern humans" are defined as the Homo sapiens species, of which the only extant subspecies is known as Homo sapiens sapiens.

According to the "Recent African Origin (RAO)" or "Out-Of-Africa" theory, H. sapiens sapiens developed shortly after this period (Khoisan mitochondrial divergence dated not later than 110,000 BP) in Eastern Africa, and as such, to be the oldest representative of the H. sapiens species found so far.