Sierra College professor and anthropologist Hank Wesselman, a self-proclaimed “shaman in training” is one of a team of scientists who have helped discover what may be the “missing link”.

“Since 1994, Wesselman has worked with the Middle Awash Research Project, an international team composed of about 20 scientists and directed by professor Tim White of UC Berkeley and Berhane Asfaw of the National Museum of Ethiopia. This spring, in a paper published in Nature, a respected British journal, the team said it had found fossil evidence for the evolutionary relationships between the three earliest human species, spanning several million years, but all in one place: Ethiopia’s Middle Awash Valley.”

According to the article, initial response from the scientific community has been positive. Wesselman’s own role is the reconstructing of the environments these early humans lived in. In addition to his work on our earliest ancestors, Wesselman also teaches an anthropology course on magic, witchcraft, and religion in the lives of traditional peoples.

Tags: Paganism