Early African Hominin Localities from Sahelanthropus to Australopithecus anamensis: A Source-Audited, GIS-Ready Dataset

Spatial information for fossil localities central to the earliest stages of human evolution is dispersed across publications, maps, supplementary material and open datasets, and many localities lack published numerical coordinates. This source-audited dataset brings those records together, reconciles conflicting or incomplete spatial information, and derives usable positions where necessary by georeferencing published locality maps in QGIS. Version 1.0 contains 43 records, comprising 15 principal records and 28 lettered subrecords, from Sahelanthropus tchadensis to Australopithecus anamensis across Chad, Ethiopia and Kenya. Each coordinate has either a published source or a transparent derivation and is assigned a coordinate-precision category. The recorded fields include specimen or material descriptions, ages, coordinates, country, site names, taxonomic assignment and confidence, landscape and rift context, principal references, and coordinate source or derivation. Public Supporting Notes A-I document selected georeferencing, taxonomic and source decisions. The dataset represents the full published locality record identified within its defined taxonomic and chronological scope. Taxonomic, chronological, spatial and palaeoenvironmental uncertainties are retained rather than normalised away, and specimen totals generally represent published specimens or catalogue entries rather than biological individuals. The resulting GIS-ready resource can be downloaded and imported directly into GIS software, where the locality data can be combined with geological, climatic, topographic and other spatial datasets.