Why Africans should be telling the story of human origins

Yohannes Haile-Selassie wants to shift the trajectory of palaeoanthropology in fossil-rich Ethiopia away from its long colonial heritage

Changemakers

This Nature Q&A series celebrates people who fight racism in science and who champion inclusion. It also highlights initiatives that could be applied to other scientific workplaces.

One of the world’s top hunters of hominid fossils, palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, appears on the Zoom screen from his home in Arizona, wearing a casual collared shirt. In the background is a photo of a field worker, silhouetted against the dimming blue sky, carrying a big sieve, an essential piece of equipment for excavating fossil remains.

Haile-Selassie says he finds the image stunning. In some ways, it takes him back to his humble beginnings, working as a fossil hunter and support-staff member for foreign scientists. He describes how far he has come since then and why he is confronting the history of a field that is overshadowed by the long reach of colonialism, through which wealthy nations still swoop in and exploit the resources of poor countries. Speaking his mind, he addresses the elephant in the room.

“A lot of the evidence that comes out of Africa informs us about our origins,” he says. He bridles at the exclusion of African researchers from many fossil discoveries made on the continent. Parachute science — the practice of Western scientists working in other nations without involving local researchers — still thrives in palaeontology, according a 2024 analysis of nearly 30,000 fossil discoveries published in Science. The study found that many palaeontology papers published in the preceding 34 years have no authors at all from the nations in which the fossils were unearthed.

Born and raised in Adigrat, Ethiopia, Haile-Selassie studied history at Addis Ababa University. Later, he earned a PhD in integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. Now the director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Haile-Selassie works to try to stop parachute science occurring in his home country. He calls for the decolonization of palaeoanthropology and radical, systemic change in who gets to tell the story of human origins, and how.

Haile-Selassie is best known for scientific discoveries that upended strongly held beliefs about human evolution. He discovered MRD, a remarkably complete 3.8-million-year-old skull in the Afar Desert region of Ethiopia in 2016¹. The specimen belongs to a species known as Australopithecus anamensis and is the most complete skull of an early human ancestor found so far from the time period. Haile-Selassie’s work showed that, rather than being the direct, linear evolutionary ‘ancestor’ of Australopithecus afarensis (the species to which the fossil known as Lucy belongs), A. anamensis and A. afarensis co-existed for a time.

Shortly before heading to Ethiopia to undertake annual fieldwork, he spoke to Nature about why he fights for inclusion and how he plans to increase the number of African palaeoanthropologists.

What is the great passion that has driven you as a scientist?

Going out into the field helped me to develop a great passion. I got what we call ‘hominid fever’ when I didn’t find something right away, but someone else did. And, when you find these fossils, you’re told that it reshapes how we think about human evolution.

Palaeoanthropology was also an opportunity for me to pursue my education. As a historian, I didn’t see an opportunity to go further in Ethiopia at the time. But working with palaeoanthropologists from other countries made me realize that I could further my studies and contribute to the discoveries from my country. In 2001, just before I finished my PhD, I published a paper in Nature, as the sole author², naming a new species, one of the earliest human ancestors, Ardipithicus ramidus kadabba. That was a big start for my career. It shaped my vision of who I wanted to be — an active player in palaeoanthropology. Not a member of support staff, but someone who can find fossils, do the analysis and description themselves and publish their work on the world stage.

Why is inclusion work important to you?

I have been asked by fellow Ethiopians, “Scientists are finding all these fossils from the Afar region of Ethiopia, but what are you doing to help train locals in palaeoanthropology?” Now, in my position at ASU, and considering the colonial legacy of our field, I want to make a difference. During the 50th anniversary celebration of Lucy’s discovery, last year, I felt it was a good opportunity to bring these issues into the limelight. We’re celebrating a fossil that was found in Africa, but we should go beyond celebrating the discoverer, Donald Johanson, a white American who founded the institute where I work. The one university in Afar, Samara University, does not have even a master’s programme in palaeoanthropology.

So some ASU colleagues and I took a group of scientists, friends and members of the institute’s board to Ethiopia. We visited several significant places, including the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, the site where Lucy was discovered and Samara’s campus. The university honoured us and named its College of Social Science and Humanities building after Donald Johanson. When we got back, I had a lot of conversations about Samara University with ASU. Now, we have a memorandum of understanding between our universities to establish an online master’s programme in palaeoanthropology to train local scholars and build research capacity in the Afar region.

When did you realize you wanted to address decolonization in science?

The natural laboratories where we collect many of the fossils that are needed to understand our history are in Africa. But often, when you look at who is collecting and studying these fossils, contributing to the science and telling the story of our origins, you don’t find any Africans. You might find some Africans named in the acknowledgments or the list of participants, but most of these people are either fossil hunters or members of support staff who help to sieve samples in the field. Why can’t we have more Africans like me? Western researchers fly to Africa, get all the raw data, then take everything back to Europe and the United States to do all the analysis and publish the work, while all the Africans they work with in the field are not part of it. That’s unfair.

Some people might say, “Oh, now there are Africans with PhDs in palaeoanthropology”. Well, that’s great, but it shouldn’t stop there. If we have the natural laboratories there, why can’t we also have the physical laboratories in Africa?