Qualla: Omo remains https://qualla.com/omo-remains en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:05 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/c/e/omo-remains-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Omo remains https://qualla.com/omo-remains Omo remains: Introduction https://qualla.com/omo-remains/ Photo credit Alessandrosmerilli, CC BY-SA 3.0. Somewhere in the badlands above the Omo River in southwestern Ethiopia, between 1967 and 1974, a scientific team led by Richard Leakey gathered up fragments of skull, jaw, and limb that turned out to be the oldest fossils of Homo sapiens ever found. They are not much to look at - two partial skulls, four jaws, a legbone, roughly two hundred loose teeth. But these scattered bones, known as the Omo remains, carry the earliest recognizable face of our own kind, and the ground that held them has been dated to a minimum of around 233,000 years ago. This is where we begin.

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Image: Alessandrosmerilli | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/c/e/omo-remains-wp/sbce-omo-remains-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Omo remains: Two Sites, Two Skeletons https://qualla.com/omo-remains/ Photo credit GuillaumeG, CC BY-SA 4.0. The fossils come from the Omo Kibish sites, and they fall into two groups named for the people who found them. The remains from Kamoya's Hominid Site - named for the legendary fossil-hunter Kamoya Kimeu - are called Omo I. Those from Paul Abell's Hominid Site became Omo II. The t...

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Image: GuillaumeG | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/c/e/omo-remains-wp/sbce-omo-remains-two-sites-two-skeletons.mp3 0:06 2 full Omo remains: The Trouble With Time https://qualla.com/omo-remains/ Photo credit GuillaumeG, CC BY-SA 4.0. Dating the Omo remains has been a decades-long detective story. The original finds came with little surrounding fauna and only a handful of stone artifacts, leaving their true age frustratingly uncertain. Early on, freshwater mollusk shells found near Omo I suggested an age of ro...

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Image: GuillaumeG | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/c/e/omo-remains-wp/sbce-omo-remains-the-trouble-with-time.mp3 0:06 3 full Omo remains: Older Than We Thought https://qualla.com/omo-remains/ Photo credit GuillaumeG, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2022, a team led by the volcanologist Celine Vidal cracked the puzzle from a new angle: the volcanoes. A thick blanket of ash lay above the sediments that held Omo I, and by matching its unique chemical fingerprint to a known eruption, the researchers could date the eruption i...

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Image: GuillaumeG | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/c/e/omo-remains-wp/sbce-omo-remains-older-than-we-thought.mp3 0:06 4 full Omo remains: The First of Us https://qualla.com/omo-remains/ Photo credit GuillaumeG, CC BY-SA 4.0. Parts of the Omo remains were the earliest fossils Richard Leakey classified as Homo sapiens, and that label still carries weight. In the long debate over where and when modern humans first appeared, Omo Kibish is a cornerstone of the case that we emerged in eastern Africa, in th...

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Image: GuillaumeG | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/c/e/omo-remains-wp/sbce-omo-remains-the-first-of-us.mp3 0:06 5 full