Jon Kalb

Jon Kalb, born August 17, 1941, in Houston, Texas, was a research geologist with the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory (Texas Memorial Museum), University of Texas at Austin. He received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory in 1968, a graduate fellowship from Johns Hopkins University in 1969, and a BSc from American University in 1970.

As a teenager Kalb began his career with a Mexican-American expedition searching for early shipwrecks off the coast of Yucatan. He later joined famed treasure hunter and marine archeologist Bob Marx exploring reefs in the Caribbean.

Sidelined by injuries from diving, Kalb was sent to the west coast of South America by the Smithsonian to collect marine fauna. He then joined a team of geologists with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in northwest Colombia mapping a potential route for a sea-level canal, which led him to prospect for gold on the Guinean Shield for the Guyana Geological Survey. While at Johns Hopkins he became interested in the plate tectonics of the Afar Depression, a triple (rift) junction in northeastern Ethiopia. In 1971 he moved to Addis Ababa with his family and over the next seven years explored the Awash Valley in the central and western Afar.

Kalb was a founder of the International Afar Research Expedition that recovered the 3.2 million year old Lucy skeleton, and later director of the Ethiopia-based mission that pioneered explorations in the Middle Awash, revealing some of the most prolific deposits bearing early hominin fossils and artifacts in the world. Discoveries included a nearly complete hyper-robust skull of a 600,000-year-old pre-Neanderthal; and a 4.4 million-year-old fossil skeleton Ardipithecus found by Tim White. From the Middle Awash site Kalb and Assefa Mebrate described the most complete known record of ancestral elephants (18 species) from a single area, which fauna serve as an analog to other equally diverse faunal groups recovered from the region, including hominids and the earliest hominins. Scores of archeological localities were found, ranging in time from the late Pliocene with the earliest stone tools to sites containing pottery. In a recent publication Kalb proposed that the illusive land of Punt—a trading partner with ancient Egypt—was situated in the central Afar, a short trek from the Gulf of Tadjura.

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