Sir

Digging in: Haile-Selassie's Galili camp, top, and Seidler's camp, bottom and inset.

Horst Seidler, in his Correspondence (Nature 411, 15; 2001) responding to the News story “Restrictions delay fossil hunts in Ethiopia” (Nature 410, 728; 2001), states that his use of the Galili research site in Ethiopia is legal. But I, not he, discovered this site, as shown in the accompanying photograph.

The Ethiopian Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage, which regulates the use of sites, incorrectly assumed that Galili and the Mulu Basin are different, and has been persuaded to allow Seidler's occupation to continue.

After participating in the discovery of Galili in 1997, I worked there each year under official permit. Then, after my first publication from this site (Am. J. Phys. Anthrop. 111, Suppl. 30, 170; 2000), Seidler arrived there, camping less than 200 metres from the place where I had found hominid fossils two years earlier. Now he claims, incorrectly, that my permit was for a different area, although the photographs [above] clearly show his camp in the same area as my earlier site.

Seidler notes that after arriving at my site, he offered to let me join his team. This offer was completely inappropriate as the site was mine in the first place. It would have been far better for Professor Seidler to have withdrawn from Galili when I appealed to Ethiopian regulators about his team's arrival there. Instead, he first apologized for what happened, now claims that my permit was for a different area, and continues to occupy the site.