Zeray Alemseged, Ph.D.
My research program focuses on the discovery and interpretation of hominid fossil remains and their environments with emphsise on fieldwork designed to acquire new data on early hominid skeletal biology, environmental context, and behavior. Specifically, I am currently working in the following areas:

In order to support this with new data, I intitated the Dikika Research Project (DRP) in 1999, which is undertaking its multidisciplinary filed research on sediments that span in age from over 3.8 Ma to less 500,000, and addresses some of the major questions in paleoanthropology. The Pliocene site of Dikika promises to increase our knowledge of the diversity of hominins prior to the time period represented by the oldest sediments of Hadar and other east African sites, and subsequent to the radiation of hominin species after the split from the great apes. The Asbole sediments on the other hand represent a time period poorly known in the region, the Middle Pleistocene. Thus the area has potential to increase our understanding of the patterns of transition from H. erectus (H. heidelbergensis) to H. sapiens.