Jon Kalb August 17, 1941 (
Houston
Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 i ...
,
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
) - October 27, 2017 (
Austin,
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
) 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 research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...
. 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.
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.
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 relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...
by the
Smithsonian to collect marine fauna.
He then joined a team of geologists with the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
, colors =
, anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day)
, battles =
, battles_label = Wars
, website =
, commander1 = ...
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
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; th ...
, a triple (rift) junction in northeastern
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
.
In 1971 he moved to
Addis Ababa
Addis Ababa (; am, አዲስ አበባ, , new flower ; also known as , lit. "natural spring" in Oromo), is the capital and largest city of Ethiopia. It is also served as major administrative center of the Oromia Region. In the 2007 census, t ...
with his family and over the next seven years explored the
Awash Valley in the central and western
Afar.
Discoveries
Kalb was a founder of the International Afar Research Expedition that recovered the
3.2 million year old
Lucy
Lucy is an 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 are Luci, Luce, Lu ...
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
''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 chimp ...
'' 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 form a taxonomic tribe of the subfamily Homininae ("hominines"). Hominini includes the extant genera ''Homo'' (humans) and '' Pan'' (chimpanzees and bonobos) and in standard usage excludes the genus ''Gorilla'' (gorillas).
The t ...
. Scores of archeological localities were found, ranging in time from the
late Pliocene
Late may refer to:
* LATE, an acronym which could stand for:
** Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, a proposed form of dementia
** Local-authority trading enterprise, a New Zealand business law
** Local average treatment effect, ...
with the earliest stone tools to
late Pleistocene sites containing pottery.
In a 2010 publication Kalb proposed that the
land of Punt
The Land of Punt ( Egyptian: '' pwnt''; alternate Egyptological readings ''Pwene''(''t'') /pu:nt/) was an ancient kingdom known from Ancient Egyptian trade records. It produced and exported gold, aromatic resins, blackwood, ebony, ivory an ...
—a trading partner with
ancient Egypt—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 ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
. In 1977 the U.S.
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
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 1982, the Australian act
* ...
.
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
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and reco ...
to reform its peer review system.
Recent years
Following more trips to Africa—joining teams with the USGS, the Technical University of 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