Housed in an unremarkable office block in the captial, the country’s national museum is home to the most extensive collection of the remains of modern humans’ ancestors – and a team of world-leading scholars
When Berhane Asfaw was in California beginning his graduate studies into the origins of humanity, he realised all the fossils he was examining had come, like himself, from Ethiopia. They had been shipped to the US to be researched and pieced together.
Back then, in the early 1980s, the only Ethiopians working on archaeological digs in their own country were labourers, employed by foreigners.
