Jon Kalb

Jon Kalb (August 17, 1941, in Houston, Texas – October 27, 2017, in Austin, 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. 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.

Discoveries Kalb was a founder of the International Afar Research Expedition. Donald Johanson found the 3.2 million year old Lucy skeleton. Kalb started the Rift Valley Research Mission. 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 late Pleistocene sites containing pottery.

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. In 1977 the U.S. National Science Foundation declined funds to Kalb's team based on these same charges, as revealed by documents he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. A year later he won a court stipulated settlement with NSF concluding that he was denied a fair hearing under the Privacy Act.