Jon Kalb August 17, 1941 (
Houston
Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...
,
Texas
Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...
) - October 27, 2017 (
Austin, Texas
Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...
) was a research geologist with the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory (Texas Memorial Museum),
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...
. He received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the
Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory
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in 1968, a graduate fellowship from Johns Hopkins University in 1969, and a BSc from
American University
The American University (AU or American) is a Private university, private University charter#Federal, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Its main campus spans 90-acres (36 ha) on Ward Circle, in the Spri ...
in 1970.
Early experience
As a teenager Kalb began his career with a Mexican-American expedition searching for early shipwrecks off the coast of the
Yucatan.
He later joined famed treasure hunter and marine archeologist
Bob Marx exploring reefs in the
Caribbean
The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...
.
Sidelined by injuries from diving, Kalb was sent to the west coast of
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...
by the
Smithsonian to collect marine fauna.
He then joined a team of geologists with the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is the military engineering branch of the United States Army. A direct reporting unit (DRU), it has three primary mission areas: Engineer Regiment, military construction, and civil wor ...
in northwest
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...
mapping a potential route for a sea-level canal,
which led him to prospect for gold on the Guinean Shield for the
Guyana
Guyana, officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, is a country on the northern coast of South America, part of the historic British West Indies. entry "Guyana" Georgetown, Guyana, Georgetown is the capital of Guyana and is also the co ...
Geological Survey.
While at Johns Hopkins he became interested in the plate tectonics of the
Afar Depression
The Afar Triangle (also called the Afar Depression) is a geological depression caused by the Afar triple junction, which is part of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. The region has disclosed fossil specimens of the very earliest hominins; ...
, a triple (rift) junction in northeastern
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...
.
In 1971 he moved to
Addis Ababa
Addis Ababa (; ,) is the capital city of Ethiopia, as well as the regional state of Oromia. With an estimated population of 2,739,551 inhabitants as of the 2007 census, it is the largest city in the country and the List of cities in Africa b ...
with his family and over the next seven years explored the
Awash Valley
}
The Awash River (sometimes spelled Awaash; Oromo: ''Awaash OR Hawaas'', Amharic: ዐዋሽ, Afar: ''Hawaash We'ayot'', Somali: ''Webiga Dir'', Italian: ''Auasc'') is a major river of Ethiopia. Its course is entirely contained within the boun ...
in the central and western
Afar.
Discoveries
Kalb was a founder of the International Afar Research Expedition.
Donald Johanson found the
3.2 million year old
Lucy
Lucy is an English language, English feminine given name derived from the Latin masculine given name Lucius with the meaning ''as of light'' (''born at dawn or daylight'', maybe also ''shiny'', or ''of light complexion''). Alternative spellings ar ...
skeleton.
Kalb started the Rift Valley Research Mission.
Kalb was 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
''Ardipithecus'' is a genus of an extinct hominine that lived during the Late Miocene and Early Pliocene epochs in the Afar Depression, Ethiopia. Originally described as one of the earliest ancestors of humans after they diverged from the chim ...
'' 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
The Hominidae (), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: '' Pongo'' (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); '' Gorilla'' (the ...
and the earliest
hominins
The Hominini (hominins) form a taxonomic tribe of the subfamily Homininae (hominines). They comprise two extant genera: ''Homo'' (humans) and '' Pan'' (chimpanzees and bonobos), and in standard usage exclude the genus ''Gorilla'' (gorillas), ...
. Scores of archeological localities were found, ranging in time from the
late Pliocene
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with the earliest stone tools to
late Pleistocene
The Late Pleistocene is an unofficial Age (geology), age in the international geologic timescale in chronostratigraphy, also known as the Upper Pleistocene from a Stratigraphy, stratigraphic perspective. It is intended to be the fourth division ...
sites containing pottery.
In a 2010 publication Kalb proposed that the
land of Punt
The Land of Punt (Egyptian language, Egyptian: ''wikt:pwnt#Egyptian, pwnt''; alternate Egyptian language#Egyptological pronunciation, Egyptological readings ''Pwene''(''t'') ) was an ancient kingdom known from Ancient Egyptian trade records. ...
—a trading partner with
ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...
—was situated in the central Afar, a short trek from the Gulf of Tadjura.
Conflicts
After Kalb established a model-training program for Ethiopian students, and the
first paleobiology research laboratory in the country, he was expelled from Ethiopia
in mid-1978 amid fabricated allegations he spied for the
CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...
. In 1977 the U.S.
National Science Foundation
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
declined funds to Kalb's team based on these same charges, as revealed by documents he obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act Freedom of Information Act may refer to the following legislations in different jurisdictions which mandate the national government to disclose certain data to the general public upon request:
* Freedom of Information Act (United States) of 1966
* F ...
.
A year later he won a court stipulated settlement with NSF concluding that he was denied a fair hearing under the Privacy Act.
A year later he successfully petitioned NSF under the
First Amendment
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* Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters, an astronomical survey carried out by the Very Large Array
* Far Infrared a ...
to reform its peer review system.
Recent years
Following more trips to Africa—joining teams with the USGS, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Vienna—Kalb renewed surveys for Eocene mammals begun in the 1930s along the remote borderlands of West Texas.
Described as the "American Afar", the region is hot, wild, and minced by faults of the Rio Grande rift with parallels to the "African Afar". To date the area has produced over 4000 extinct mammals, including some of the last known primates in North America.
Awards
*Robert W. Hamilton Award. University of Texas at Austin. For non-fiction, ''Adventures in the Bone Trade'', 2002
*Violet Crown Award, Writers League of Texas. For non-fiction, ''Adventures in the Bone Trade'', 2001.
*Court Stipulated Settlement, Kalb vs National Science Foundation. D.D.C., Civ. No. 86-3557, 8 December 1987.
Selected bibliography
*Kalb, Jon. 2011. ''Hunting Tapir During the Great Flood, And Other Tales of Exploration and High Adventure''. Special Delivery Books, Alpine, Texas. 288pp.
*Kalb, Jon. 2001. ''Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Early Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression''. Copernicus Books (imprint of Springer-Verlag) 389pp.
*Kalb, Jon, et al. 2000. ''Bibliography of the Earth Sciences for the Horn of Africa: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti 1620-1993''. American Geological Institute, Alexandria, Virginia. 149pp.
*Kalb, J. E., D.J. Froehlich, and G. L. Bell. 1996. ''Phylogeny of African and Eurasian Elephantoidea of the late Neogene''. Chapter 12B, 117-123. In: ''The Proboscidea—Trends in Evolution and Paleoecology'', Eds.
J. Shoshani and P. Tassy. Oxford University Press.
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Fiction
*Kalb, Jon. 2007. ''The Gift: Discovery, Treachery, and Revenge.'' Special Delivery Books, Alpine, Texas. Reviewed in ''Nature'' 451: 128.
References
External links
* https://web.archive.org/web/20070826232232/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_5_110/ai_75247899
dventures in the BoneTrade John van Couvering, Book Review* http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/089896292085738217
ias Awarding Scientific Grants, T. O. McGarity
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kalb, Jon
1941 births
2017 deaths
20th-century American geologists
21st-century American geologists
People from Houston
Land of Punt