Jean de Heinzelin de Braucourt

He gained international fame in 1950 when he discovered the Ishango Bone[1] "Jean de Heinzelin was a geologist.

A kind of a modern adventurer, Jean de Heinzelin was a field worker and a remarkable observer.

Africa was his main area of work, but he also took part in various expeditions in Europe, the United States and the Middle East.

A consistent voice of empiricism and reason in African paleoecology, Dr. Heinzelin made many contributions to the understanding of how geology can inform about the history and prehistory of tropical landscapes.

Many of his original conclusions are still valid, especially his interpretation of the humid tropical fluvial origin of sand and gravel sediments in Central Africa that are still wrongly attributed to desert processes (e.g., J. Runge 2007).