Part 3/15:
The discovery was not just a matter of luck but also an extraordinary feat of fieldwork and scientific detective work. The Ethiopian landscape, rife with tribal conflicts and political upheavals—culminating in the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie and the subsequent Marxist regime—made such excavations perilous. Yet, after years of interrupted research, the team resumed fieldwork in the early 1990s, opportunistically exploring vast, geologically layered terrains that held tiny windows into the distant past.