Senate resignations mar academy's birthday

Rex Dalton,San DiegoThe remains of a hominid that date backnearly 4 million years have been uncoveredby a field team in Ethiopia.

The discovery, announced in AddisAbaba on 4 March, looks set to providecrucial new evidence on early man’s abilityto walk upright.

Palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie and his colleagues found the bonesnear Mille Town, about 520 kilometresnortheast of Addis Ababa. “It is too early to tell what species is represented,” saysHaile-Selassie, a curator at the ClevelandMuseum of Natural History in Ohio.

A detailed description of the fossils will be submitted for publication onceexcavations and bone analysis are complete,

which may not be for another year.By studying the bones and muscle

connections, anthropologists can decipherthe mechanics of how different hominidspecies came to walk as they evolved fromprimates.

In addition to bones of the legs, hip andspine, the team uncovered a completescapula, or shoulder bone. It is extremelyrare to secure a scapula, as the thin bone istypically damaged by the forces of time.

The shoulder bone should provideimportant new data on arm and bodyfunctions. The leg bones indicate that theindividual hominid was taller than Lucy(Australopithecus afarensis), a 3.2-million-year-old fossil found in 1974 about 60 kmsouth of the new site.

Examination of animal fossils foundwith the new hominid specimen suggeststhat it lived between 3.8 million and 4 million years ago.

The team’s preliminary analysis indicatesthe hominid is a form of Australopithecus.It may be an Australopithecus anamensis —known only by a few bones and teeth foundin Kenya, where that species lived about 4 million years ago.

The director of the Cleveland Museum,palaeoanthropologist Bruce Latimer, is a co-leader of the project, but he was not in thefield when the fossils were found. Fossils onthe surface were immediately collected by theteam to prevent them from being damaged.Digging is expected to begin later this year as the team looks for other specimens. ■

Alison AbbottThe European Academy of Sciences andArts in Salzburg, Austria, celebrated its 15thanniversary last weekend with considerablepomp and ceremony. But the party has beenpooped by allegations of mismanagement.

The accusations centre on a lack of trans-parency about the body’s finances and thealleged failure of its president,Salzburg heartsurgeon Felix Unger, to properly abide by theacademy’s rules.

Unger denies the allegations, which werefirst reported in the German newspaper Süd-deutsche Zeitungon 4 March.He says that theyhave been made up by people who have tried,but failed,to get money from the academy.

The academy has some 1,200 members,nearly half of them from Austria or Germany.It is divided into seven sections, ranging inscope from religion to science,and has severalinstitutes under its umbrella. These include

two run by Unger himself — the EuropeanHeart Institute and the European Institute ofMedicine — which share the same address.

The academy has the patronage of the cityof Vienna and the Austrian government, andhas a grant of €150,000 (US$200,000) fromthe European Commission, primarily tohelp cover its administrative costs. Its web-site also features a long list of companies andorganizations designated as partners, bene-factors, sponsors and donators.

But in the weeks running up to theanniversary celebration, three members ofthe academy’s 18-strong senate resigned,expressing many concerns including lack ofclarity on how money flows into, and out of,the academy.

Justin Stagl, a sociologist from the Uni-versity of Salzburg and former chairman ofthe academy’s nominations committee, saidin his 8 February resignation letter that he

had resigned because he was unable to per-suade Unger to stop nominating new mem-bers without discussion with, or the consentof, the senate. He also noted that many ordi-nary members had resigned and had criti-cized a ‘personality cult’, ‘clientelism’ and‘empty boasting’at the academy.

Ernst Pöppel, a neuropsychologist at theUniversity of Munich, was dean of the sci-ence section of the academy but says heresigned because Unger had become “a one-man show”, changing the legal basis of theacademy without discussion with the senateand not opening the accounts of the academyto scrutiny. “There is no transparency in thefinances of the academy,”he says.“For exam-ple, once a very large debt appeared, but wasthen wiped out, without anyone being able to find out why we had gone into debt andwho had paid the debt off.”

Bernd-Olaf Küppers, a philosopher fromthe University of Jena, who had been dean ofthe academy’s humanities section, said thathe too resigned on the grounds of its lack offinancial transparency.

Unger says that the academy aspires toforge a European identity through interdis-ciplinary, transnational and bridge-buildingactivities. He insists that the financialaccounts have always been open to the sen-ate.“It’s all lies,”he says.

Unger has his supporters in the senate.Eugen Biser, a theologian at the University ofMunich and dean of the academy’s world religion section, says that the accusations areborn of“revenge and spite”and that the acad-emy must allow the affair to blow over.GilbertFayl, foreign secretary at the academy,says theaccusations are “purely personal”. ■

Additional reporting by Tamara Grüner.

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126 NATURE | VOL 434 | 10 MARCH 2005 | www.nature.com/nature

Senate resignations mar academy’s birthday

Anthropologists walk tall after unearthing hominid

Cool location: Salzburg in Austria is home to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

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