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Dikika Baby
NOVEMBER 2006
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By Christopher P. Sloan
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Photograph, right, by Zeresenay Alemseged, ©2006 Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH)
Photograph, left, by Kenneth Garrett, ©2006 ARCCH
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The skull of the Dikika baby, a 3.3-million-year-old infant discovered by Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged. The find is the most complete ancient infant and arguably the best fossil of its species, Australopithecus afarensis, ever found.
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Zeresenay Alemseged has two babies. One is Alula, who spends most of his time in his mother's arms in a cozy bungalow in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital. The other is a little girl of three, who spent 3.3 million years locked in sandstone, until the Ethiopian scientist and his team discovered her remains and painstakingly teased them out of the rock. It was a long, slow second birth for a baby from the dawn of humanity.
Until now all fossils of babies this ancient could have fit in a diaper. This new arrival is not only the most complete ancient infant but arguably the best fossil of her species, Australopithecus afarensis. That's the same species as the superstar fossil called Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old adult female found in 1974. Unlike Lucy, the baby has fingers, a foot, and a complete torso. "But the most impressive difference between them," says Zeresenay (Ethiopians' first names are their formal ones), "is that this baby has a face."
No bigger than a cantaloupe, the little bundle of bones may also bear witness to a key event in the evolution of hominins, as humans and their ancestors are known: the beginning of our long, dependent childhood, when we grow our large brains. "Outside of its completeness, the major importance of this find is the light it will shed on how this species lived and grew," says Bill Kimbel, an expert on A. afarensis and a member of the study team. "Now we can begin to read its biography."
It is a curious coincidence that the world's oldest baby, who died while still of nursing age, lived her short life in a region named Dikika—"nipple" in the local Afar language, after a distinctly shaped hill. The hill is just across the winding Awash River from Hadar, the site in Ethiopia's Rift Valley where Lucy and the fossils of many other hominins have been found. The region is plagued by extreme heat, flash floods, malaria, and occasional shoot-outs between rival ethnic groups, not to mention lions, hyenas, and other uninvited nocturnal guests. It is one of the most difficult places on Earth to hunt for fossils—and one of the most fruitful.
For decades the low-lying northern end of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the Afar depression, has been the domain of foreign-led expeditions. Zeresenay, one of a new generation of Ethiopian paleoanthropologists, changed that in 1999 when he led a band of Ethiopian fossil hunters into the Afar badlands.
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