Naomi Levin breaks down research silos and brings a career-long goal to fruition
Researchers working on early hominin fossils can be protective of their sites, at times infamously so. While working in isolation may have sufficed in the last century, forging new collaborations is now necessary to make cutting-edge progress toward understanding humans’ roots, according to Professor Naomi Levin.
Levin, a geochemist, has worked for more than two decades reconstructing paleoenvironments of East Africa, where early hominin fossils, including the famous Australopithecus afarensis skeleton nicknamed “Lucy,” were found. There, research teams working on sites just tens of miles apart, finding different species, have not historically collaborated. That has left significant gaps in our understanding of human evolution.
“Silos limit science,” Levin said. “People are starting to realize that.”Levin is part of an international team, funded by a W.M. Keck Foundation grant, studying two sites in Ethiopia: Hadar and Woranso-Mille. The sites are about 30 kilometers and tens to hundreds of thousands of years apart, but their fossil records are nothing alike. Hadar (3.18 Ma) is where Lucy was found in 1974. Scientists then searched through thousands of fossils from the locality and didn’t find another species. “Afarensis was the only game in town,” Levin said.
In 2012, Levin’s collaborator, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, found what looked like an opposable toe at Woranso-Mille—a different species, just 18 miles away. They eventually unearthed more species at the site, including the first skull of A. anamensis. The question was how two sites, relatively close in space and time, could host such different fossil assemblages.
“To answer that, we needed two teams,” Levin said—one at each site, working in tandem with the other. “We have broad trends in the story of human evolution and climate, but now, we’re at a point in the science where we have to roll up our sleeves and look at the details.”
Levin and her PhD student, Million Mengesha, spent two weeks in early 2024 working at Hadar, sampling paleosol carbonates and fossil teeth to be used for carbon and oxygen isotope analyses, and sediments for petrographic and provenance analyses. One of Levin’s main contributions to the effort is her cutting-edge work on using the oxygen triple isotope system to reconstruct aridity, a critical part of a site’s paleoenvironment. She and Mengesha will focus on those while collaborators work on phytoliths and biomarkers.
Her working hypothesis is that Woranso-Mille could have been closer to or in a basin, creating a more arid environment and driving different evolutionary adaptations. Teasing out the answer will require slow, careful work, but it’s a job Levin is eager to take on, having been working toward it for decades.“I’m circling back to something I’ve always wanted to do,” Levin said. “It’s the most satisfying thing ever.”
The project has also begun establishing ways to collaborate with Ethiopian scientists and recruit students from East Africa, Levin said. “I’m really excited about the opportunities to build pathways for formal training,” she said. “Funding has been a limitation, but it’s really important work.”
