Bench

The bench was spotted in a photo from 1898 taken during a Russian expedition to Ethiopia, just after the First Italian-Ethiopian War ended with a clear defeat of Italy. The bench belonged to the local residents in the area where Omo River meets with Lake Turkana. Omo River is a renowned area where archaeologists found bone fragments from early humans of the species Homo Sapiens in 1967. Since then, improved dating techniques have established that the bones are in fact much older than it was initially assumed. The rests were estimated to date back to 195.000 BCE, and were considered at the time the oldest known traces of contemporary humankind. It was later when the Jebel Irhoud remains were found in Morocco, dating from ca. 300,000 years ago, or when the Florisbad Skull from South Africa was discovered, dating from ca. 259,000 years ago. Even with these more recent findings, the rests in Omo River support the widely acknowledged hypothesis that the first humans evolved in this part of Africa and spread from there to the rest of the planet.