Melka Kuntre

Melka Kunture Prehistoric Site, which is situated on the south face of the Awash river gorge opposite Melka Awash, 50km from Addis Ababa by road. Regarded as one of the most important Stone Age sites in Ethiopia, Melka Kunture’s potential was first recognized in 1963 by G Dekker, who realized that the layers of rock washed away by the river during the annual floods represented a fossil record covering more than a million years. Melka Kunture is best known for the numerous Stone Age artifacts that have been unearthed along the river, including a variety of cleavers, hand-axes and other tools made from basalt and other hard rocks. The site has also proved to be an important source of fossils of extinct mammal species, including hippo, giraffe, gelada and wildebeest, the last long absent from Ethiopia. Although the site has not yet thrown up any hominid fossils as significant as those unearthed at Hadar or Turkana, several Homo erectus fossils have been found, dating back between 1.5 and 1.7 million years. Cranial fragments of early Homo sapiens, probably more than 500,000 years old, have also been uncovered.