Kansas City

Disputes over access to some of the world's richest fossil sites are disrupting research on human evolution, according to those working in the field.

Some Ethiopian researchers say new rules have forced them to leave productive sites and stopped them studying their discoveries by denying them laboratory access. And at least one Ethiopian doctoral candidate's degree could be jeopardized by the situation.

Disagreements over site access have been simmering since early 2000. But the dispute heated up considerably last summer when the Ethiopian government introduced new regulations to control physical anthropology projects. The regulations and their impact were the subject of much discussion last month at the annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and the Paleoanthropology Society in Kansas City, Missouri.

The regulations were announced last year by the Ethiopian Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage. They set time limits for research, require payments for the use of laboratory facilities — and ask foreign research teams to give up their equipment and vehicles at the end of the project.

But the rules are viewed by some palaeoanthropologists as biased and damaging to research efforts. And some researchers fear that the rules might not be applied equally to all teams.

Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian anthropologist and archaeologist who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University, believes that the regulations will make it increasingly difficult to do research at the National Museum of Ethiopia and in the field. But he remains optimistic: “Eventually the Ethiopian government will realize what is going on and make a change,” he says.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is also worried about the regulations, which, officials there say, conflict with NSF policies on the disposal of equipment purchased with the agency's grant money. Last month, Mark Weiss, director of the NSF's physical anthropology programme, met with the Ethiopian ambassador in Washington to discuss the issue. The talks were cordial, says Weiss, with the ambassador saying that concerns would be examined.

Last week, Brook Hailu, deputy Ethiopian ambassador to the United States, said that it is “the general policy of the Ethiopian government that people of high calibre can conduct research”. The government will examine the new regulations to see if changes need to be made, said Hailu. “I have no doubt that our government will cancel partially or in total any regulations found to be negative,” he added.

Rich pickings: Ethiopian sites are yielding large numbers of hominid fossils.

There have been plenty of disputes before over research access in Ethiopia, but the present row has arisen over a rewarding site called Galili, about 300 kilometres northeast of Addis Ababa.

Yohannes Haile Selassie, an Ethiopian doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, spent three years studying this site, finally finding important hominid fossils there in 1998. But in February 2000, an Austrian team headed by Horst Seidler arrived at the site, saying it had government permission to conduct field research there.

Haile Selassie says that the regulations “kicked me out of my site”. Since then, he says, he has been unable to conduct analysis on specimens at the National Museum laboratory in Addis Ababa or continue field studies at Galili. His doctoral degree is threatened because he has now exceeded the three-year limit enforced by the Ethiopian regulations.

When Haile Selassie's mentor, palaeoanthropologist Tim White, also at Berkeley, stood up for him, the Ethiopian field-research permits for White's Middle Awash research team were suspended in February. White declined to comment.

But Middle Awash team geologist Giday WoldeGabriel, an Ethiopian now at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, says that he thinks the regulations favour the Austrian team. “It makes me very angry,” he says.

Insisting that he had nothing to do with formulating the Ethiopian regulations, Seidler, of Vienna's Institute of Anthropology, says he has conducted himself appropriately. “Haile Selassie was never displaced from his area,” says Seidler, adding that the Ethiopian had not correctly defined his field site. “I have obtained my permit . . . in a transparent and legal way.”