Lower Valley of the Awash

The story of our own origins was rewritten in the Awash valley of Ethiopia's Afar region. Among the richest fossil-hunting grounds on the continent, its beds have yielded hominin remains reaching back at least four million years — most famously Lucy, the partial skeleton reconstructed from 52 fragments discovered in 1974. Findings here reshaped scientific thinking about human evolution, and UNESCO inscribed the Lower Valley of the Awash as a World Heritage Site in 1980.