BODO
LOCATION
Bod0 D’Ar, Middle Awash Valley, Afar Depression,
Ethiopia.
DISCOVERY
Alemayehu Asfaw and Paul Whitehead, members of
the Rift Valley Research Expedition in Ethiopia, di-
rected by J. Kalb, November 1976 (face); J. Clark and
others, 1981 (parietal); 1990 (humeral fragment). For
further information, see Kalb (2001).MATERIAL
Hominid face and partial neurocranium, found in
fragments; parietal bone; partial humeral diaphysis.DATING AND STRATIGRAPHIC CONTEXT
The geology of the Middle Awash was relatively
poorly understood when the Bod0 partial cranium
was recovered in 1976 (see account by Kalb et al.,
1982), and has since been partly revised by Clark
et al. (1994). The three hominid fossils come from
the Upper Bod0 Sand Unit of a 20-m-thick sediment
pile that is separated by a fault from (but that is ap-
parently a continuation of) a neighboring sequence
containing volcanics Ar/Ar dated to about 640 Ka. If
the correlation is correct, the dated volcanics lie
stratigraphically below the level from which the
hominid fossils came, and Clark et al. thus assign an
approximate age of 600 Ka to these fossils. This ageagrees quite well with that of the fauna reported by
Kalb et al. (1982).ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT
Stone tools are fairly numerous in the Bod0 deposits. In
lower strata, they are of mode 1 type, with a conspicu-
ous absence of handaxes, indicating a much later transi-
tion to mode 2 than has been documented elsewhere in
Africa. The Acheulean appears in some abundance
within the sedimentary unit containing the hominids,
but at a lower level (Clark et al., 1994). The face itself
bears cutmarks that indicate defleshing (White, 1986).PREVIOUS DESCRIPTIONS AND ANALYSES
The initial describers of the Bod0 face (Conroy et al.,
1978) found the specimen to stand “close to the
Homo erectus-Homo sapiens transition,” and remarked
on its resemblances to the Kabwe and Petralona cra-
nia. Nobody has since disputed these resemblances,
which is why Clark et al. (1994) observed that “the
specimen is usually referred to as ‘archaic’ Homo sapi-
ens.” Nonetheless, these latter authors themselves
preferred to allocate it to “African Homo erectus.”
Lately, a growing tendency has developed to separate
the Bodo/Kabwe /Petralona /Arago group into its
own species, Homo heidelhergemis (e.g., Tattersall,
1986; Rightmire, 1990). Using computed tomogra-
phy (CT) scan data, Conroy et al. (2000) produced a
mirror-image cranial reconstruction from which they
derived a cranial capacity of around 1,250 ml.27