The Gawis cranium is a portion of a fossil hominid skull discovered on February 16, 2006 near the drainage of Gawis, a tributary of the Awash River in the Afar Depression, Ethiopia. Despite volcanic ash layers which hold the key to dating, the cranium is dated very sparsely between 200,000 and 500,000 years ago due to unfortunate taphonomic properties.
The 2006 discovery was reported by Sileshi Semaw, director of the Gona Project, who is based at the Stone Age Institute and IU Bloomington's CRAFT research center. Semaw suspects the skull could be a transitional fossil that fills a gap in human evolutionary origins. Its appearance is described as intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.
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