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enduring daily hardship and danger. In his account of the expedition, Nesbitt noted how Afar warriors wore the testicles of their victims as trophies to prove their prowess. In 1933, a young English adventurer, Wilfred Thesiger, set out from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to explore the Awash River as it meandered through Afar territory, well aware of the natives’ murderous reputation. ‘A man’s standing depended on the number of men he had killed and castrated’, wrote Thesiger. British officials gave him a one-in-ten chance of surviving. But Thesiger found the Afar mostly hospitable. ‘In time I learnt to tell at a glance, from the decorations he wore, how often a man had killed, just as I might tell from his campaign medals where a British soldier had served’.

In the post-war era, the Afar Triangle became of increasing interest to geologists pursuing new theories about continental drift and plate tectonics, ideas that were revolutionising the world of classical geology. Geologists discovered that the Afar Triangle is sited on a triple junction of three giant troughs in the earth’s surface: the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and Africa’s Rift Valley. These troughs were formed following the gradual separation of three major plates: the African (or Nubian), the Arabian and the East African (or Somali). Over a 30-million-year period, these three plates have been pulling apart—the African to the northwest; the Arabian to the northeast; and the Somali to the south. Sitting atop a cauldron of hot magma, the Afar junction is a geological ‘hotspot’ providing much of the energy behind these tectonic movements; on the surface, erupting volcanoes have spewed out a mass of lava, ash and rock. Over time, as the valley floor sank, the Afar region became a vast basin—a catchment area for rivers flowing down from the Ethiopian highlands, carrying silt, mud and sediment and forming lakes and floodplains.

In 1965, a thirty-year-old French geologist, Maurice Taieb, began exploring parts of the Awash Valley, an area that extended for about 30,000 square miles. Born in Tunisia, Taieb was studying for a doctorate at the University of Paris. He was familiar with desert environments and soon developed a particular fascination for the Afar region. Short of funds, he often continued to explore on foot, packing his supplies on donkeys and staying with Afar tribesmen along the way. During his third field season in 1969, he was driving across a gravel plateau near the northern bend of the Awash River when he came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a cliff.

Before him lay a stretch of the river fringed by dark green riverine forest; and beyond it an immense panorama of arid badlands. Once the bed of an ancient lake, the sedimentary terrain had been transformed by erosion into a landscape of crumpled hills and steep ravines. Streams from the adjacent highlands and searing wind had cut through 600 feet of prehistoric sediments, exposing multicoloured layers of rock and sand deposits. The site, Taieb related, was ‘exceptional and fantastic’. An American geologist, Jon Kalb, who accompanied Taieb there two years later, described it as being like ‘an enormous, flat-lying encyclopaedia of natural history with part of one page exposed on this hill, another in that ravine, another on the crest of a ridge’. The local Afar called the place ‘Ahdi d’ar’. But Taieb recorded the name as Hadar. Exploring the area for a few brief hours before sunset, he found elephant, rhinoceros and pig fossils; the elephant teeth he picked up and took back to Paris were later estimated to be 3 million years old.

Taieb’s discovery of Hadar and other promising sites in the Awash Valley brought international attention to the area. After meeting Taieb at the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory in Addis Ababa in December 1971, Louis Leakey agreed to help him with letters of recommendation. In 1972, Taieb returned to Hadar leading a group of French and American scientists on a detailed reconnaissance. A fullscale expedition—the International Afar Research Expedition—was launched the following