Why Is The Great Rift Valley So Important In Our Understanding Of Human Evolution?

[Judi Lynn]

This incredibly geologically active place tells one of Earth’s most important stories.

Rachael Funnell
Writer & Senior Digital Producer

When Homo sapiens first came onto the scene, we were just one of several human species walking the Earth. You might imagine that we just sort of popped up one day with a nice, simple, single point of origin, but the true story is a bit more complicated than that.

Our emergence was slow and, as the BBC's latest series Human with palaeoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi reveals, we really weren’t all that impressive in the beginning. It’s thought we popped up across thousands of miles over hundreds of thousands of years, appearing bit by bit across the African continent. So, why is it that Africa’s Great Rift Valley is considered such an important place for understanding our species' origin story? Well, for starters, it’s an absolute playground for archaeologists.

A fossil bonanza
Stretching over 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) from Lebanon in the Middle East down to Mozambique in southeastern Africa, the Great Rift Valley (or East African Rift System) is considered one of the most significant locations on Earth for understanding human evolution. That’s not necessarily because all the action was unfolding here, but because nowhere else has contributed more to our understanding of how Homo sapiens first emerged.

“In terms of the human story, it's one of the most fossil-rich places in the world, and that's as a result of the stuff being preserved in the sediments," said the BBC Science Unit’s Paul Overton, executive producer on Human, to IFLScience. "Sediments have built up at the bottom of the valley, and anything trapped within the sediment has been quite well preserved.”

“Hot countries are the worst for trying to extract DNA, it gets destroyed very easily, but that spot in the Rift Valley has preserved loads of fossils like Omo 1 and Herto 1, the first anatomically modern humans. There's loads of earlier fossils as well, going back even further in the human story [including the famous Lucy]. It's just a particularly good area for finds.”

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/why-is-the-great-rift-valley-so-important-in-our-understanding-of-human-evolution-80207