In Georgia, a missing link?

DMANISI, Georgia—The forested bluff that overlooks this sleepy Georgian hamlet seems an unlikely portal into the mysteries surrounding the dawn of man.

Think human evolution, and one conjures up the wind-swept savannas and badlands of East Africa's Great Rift Valley. Georgians may claim their ancestors made Georgia the cradle of wine 8,000 years ago, but the cradle of mankind lies 3,300 miles away, at Tanzania's famed Olduvai Gorge.

But it is here in the verdant uplands of southern Georgia that David Lordkipanidze, a paleoanthropologist, has been unearthing one of the largest and most significant troves of prehistoric human fossils ever found outside of the Great Rift Valley. In doing so, he has begun to change fundamental beliefs about human evolution, and about early man's migration out of Africa.Full Article

In Georgia, a missing link?