ABOVE: Maurice Taieb studying a fossil at the Hadar formation in 1972
COURTESY OF DONALD JOHANSON
Famed geologist Maurice Taieb, whose discovery of the Hadar formation in the Afar region of Ethiopia became key to studying human evolution, has died at the age of 86, the French National Centre for Scientific Research reports. In 1974, the 3.2-million-year-old bones of Australopithecus afarensis, better known as Lucy, were found in the formation.
Taieb was born in Tunisia on July 22, 1935. According to a 2006 profile in Nature, he spent his youth accompanying his uncle, a merchant, around Africa. Eventually, he moved to his mother’s native land of France, and earned his geology PhD from the University of Paris VI in 1974.
While exploring in 1968, Taieb had discovered a cache of snail fossils in what would be known as the Hadar Formation. He suspected that, due to the site’s proximity to where ...
