Ethiopian Scientist Zeresenay Alemseged on PBS’s "Becoming Human" Documentary

Ethiopian Scientist Zeresenay Alemseged on PBS’s “Becoming Human” Documentary

Ethiopian scientist Zeresenay (Zeray) Alemseged, who discovered the 3.3 million year old girl fossil called Selam in Ethiopia, is featured on PBS’s “Becoming Human” documentary which is being shown this week. Zeresenay is currently curator and chair of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences and a world renowned paleontologist.

For several months each year, paleontologist Zeresenay “Zeray” Alemseged patiently and methodically sifts through soils—and time—under the relentless sun in the remote reaches of Ethiopia’s Afar region. There he leads exploration of the Busidima-Dikika paleoanthropological site, which is yielding important clues about the four-million-year history of human evolution.

Native to Ethiopia, Zeray was born in 1969. Eager to understand why his country yields so many pieces to the puzzle of human evolution, he earned an undergraduate degree in geology from Addis Ababa University in 1990 and went to work for the National Museum of Ethiopia.

After two years, Alemseged left for France. There he received a master’s in paleontology at the University of Montpellier and University of Paris in 1994 and a doctorate from the University of Paris and the French National Museum of Natural History in 1998.

Source: National Geography and PBS

Click here to watch the documentary from PBS