Talk:Gona, Ethiopia

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2021 and 6 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): English2017. Peer reviewers: Mukafly, Sophgao.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:53, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Article Editing and Additions

Hello!I just added two new sections to the article, including one on hominid fossils and another on stone tools. I also added some information to the geography section and reorganized it some to integrate the previous information with the new additions. These sections are still in progress and I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks! English2017 (talk) 16:38, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello I changed homnid to hominin because that is more a more specific classification of humans and human ancestors. The fossils mentioned were both hominins. C99L35 (talk)

Hello all! I am going to be updating and editing this article as part of my African Prehistory class. I just wanted to let everyone know my general plan of action before I start! The main thing that I am hoping to do is add additional information to the stone tool section of the article. Gona's Oldowan assemblages, while no longer the oldest, have been used in research that tries to understand the development of cumulative culture. Cumulative culture is a process where an element of material culture and the related behavior is shared within a group and improved on over time to help a group better adapt to the environment. If you apply this to the Oldowan it helps us understand how stone tools and associated behaviors like eating meat by scavenging carnivore kills set the stage later hominins to become successful hunters and create more complex stone tools. I will also be adding more information about hominin fossils and paleoecology! C99L35 (talk) 20:53, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Hello! I just added a new section to the article covering the history of the project area and how it was historically viewed by archaeologists. C99L35 (talk)

Hi again! I am planning to put the information in the zooarchaeology section into the archaeology section. I want to situate the discussion of Gona's Oldowan assemblages within the larger debates about Oldowan technological behavior. Tool use is an element of technological behavior. Additionally, the way that hominins would aquire meat is an debated aspect of the technological behavior. The debate is primarly about if Oldowan hominins had primary access to meat (meaning they hunted) or secondary access (meaning the were scavengers). The way the section is currently framed is biased towards the hunting side of the debate. I can also flesh this out in the section as it is now. Please feel free to reach out with any opinions on this change. C99L35 (talk) 16:38, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Resources for Article

This is a space where new research articles on Gona can be shared! C99L35 (talk) C99L35 (talk) 00:39, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Here are some resources I plan to use to improve this wikipedia page.

Baab, K. L., Rogers, M., Bruner, E., & Semaw, S. (2022). Reconstruction and analysis of the DAN5/P1 and BSN12/P1 Gona Early Pleistocene Homo fossils. Journal of Human Evolution, 162, 103102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2021.103102 (This is a recent article that speaks to H. erectus fossils from Gona. I will use it to provide information about H. erectus at Gona in the paleoanthropology section of the page)

de Lumley, H., Barsky, D., Moncel, M. H., Carbonell, E., Cauche, D., Celiberti, V., … Semaw, S. (2018). The first technical sequences in human evolution from East Gona, Afar region, Ethiopia. Antiquity, 92(365), 1151–1164. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2018.169 (This article provides information about early Oldowan at Gona. It is a more recent compliment to Semaw 2003)

Harmand, S., Lewis, J. E., Feibel, C. S., Lepre, C. J., Prat, S., Lenoble, A., … Roche, H. (2015). 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 521(7552), 310–315. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14464 Lewis, J. E., & Harmand, S. (2016). An earlier origin for stone tool making: Implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1698), 20150233. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0233 (These papers address stone tools found at Lomekwi 3, which have been dubbed the Lomekwian. Although their is discourse in the literature about the Lomekwian it is a stone tool industry that predates Oldowan)

Plummer, T. W., Oliver, J. S., Finestone, E. M., Ditchfield, P. W., Bishop, L. C., Blumenthal, S. A., … Potts, R. (2023). Expanded geographic distribution and dietary strategies of the earliest Oldowan hominins and Paranthropus. Science, 379(6632), 561–566. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abo7452 (This article discusses a site with a possible earlier date for Oldowan.)

Semaw, S. (2006). The Oldest Stone Artifacts from Gona (2.6-2.5 Ma), Afar, Ethiopia: Implications for understanding the earliest stages of stone knapping. In K. D. Schick & N. P. Toth (Eds.), The Oldowan: Case studies into the earliest Stone Age (pp. 43–75). Gosport, IN: Stone Age Institute. (this article is a compliment to Semaw 2003 that has not yet been referenced on this page. It will add more information to the stone tool section of the article)

Simpson, S. W., Quade, J., Levin, N. E., Butler, R., Dupont-Nivet, G., Everett, M., & Semaw, S. (2008). A Female Homo erectus Pelvis from Gona, Ethiopia. Science, 322(5904), 1089–1092. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1163592 (This article addresses an important h.Erectus fossl find from Gona)

Stinchcomb, G. E., Quade, J., Levin, N. E., Iverson, N., Dunbar, N., McIntosh, W., … Semaw, S. (2022). Fluvial response to Quaternary Hydroclimate in Eastern Africa: Evidence from Gona, Afar [Preprint]. In Review. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2327243/v1 (This article will provide more information for the geology section of the article)

If you have any other suggestions for sources to add to the page please feel free to do so or let me know and I can help faciliate their inclusion.C99L35 (talk)

Article Feedback

Hi! I am going to be working on this article. It's a great article so far about a really important site. One thing I noticed about this article is that because it relies on few sources the information is more specific to the sources, which interrupts the organizational flow. I hope to improve on this over the coming weeks! C99L35 (talk) 00:47, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I am in process of adding new content to this page. I am currently working in the Archaeology section. C99L35 (talk) 22:03, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: African Prehistory

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 January 2023 and 8 May 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): C99L35 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by C99L35 (talk) 23:57, 25 February 2023 (UTC)