Zeresenay Alemseged

Zeresenay Alemseged ( born June 4, 1969 in Axum, Ethiopia ) is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist.

Zeresenay Alemseged studied from 1987 to 1990 Geology at the University of Addis Ababa ( Degree: BSc) and then worked at the Laboratory of Paleoanthropology of the National Museum of Ethiopia. From 1993 to 1998 he studied with a scholarship from the CNOUS in French universities of Montpellier II and Paris VI and at the Muséum national d' histoire naturelle. He earned a graduate degree and a doctorate degree in paleontology.

In 1999 he initiated the DRP Research Project ( DRP) in the Afar region in Ethiopia, of which he is. From 2000 to 2003 he also served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University from 2004 to 2008 he was employed as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Since then, he is the director and curator of the Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences.

Under the DRP Research Projects he discovered in 2000, the oldest preserved until today children skeleton, the 3,3 million year old bones of DIK 1-1 (called " Selam " or after the site " DRP Girl" ), a three year old child of the species Australopithecus afarensis. At the same species also includes the 1974 discovered " Lucy".

In 2010 Alemseged was involved in the publication of the finds of animal bones square DRP. The beyond superficial scratches on the bone were interpreted as the world's oldest cut marks, which also proves the use of stone tools about 3.4 million years ago. The publication sparked a scientific debate.