"Medemer"

"In the days following his D.C. gathering, the prime minister traveled to Los Angeles and Minneapolis, meeting waves of enthusiastic Ethiopians and Ethiopian Americans across the country. Some, like Girma, have found an unexpected affirmation of their identities—and a new voice.
"'There's a place for me in this … I can own my story and my context, knowing that Ethiopia is still yene hagere [my country] and I am hers,' Girma said after Saturday's events. 'And however my responsibility to [my] country manifests in the years to come, it comes from that place of love, of belonging.'"

Hannah Giorgis at The Atlantic reports on the state of the Ethiopian diaspora.

Lucy in the Ground with Fossils

"Researchers had previously believed that the first member of the human family tree to walk upright was Homo erectus, which flourished between 1.8 million and 70,000 years ago before giving way to modern humans. But the new discovery indicates that the transition from trees to grasslands actually took place one to 2 million years earlier."

Thomas H. Maugh II in the Los Angeles Times reports on a recent conclusion about a "fossilized foot bone from Ethiopia."