During September and October 1973, Amini Aza Mturi and the Tanzanian Department of Antiquities conducted an excavation of the exposed flats of the western shoreline of Lake Ndutu.
According to Amini Aza Mturi, preliminary chronometric dating and racemization of bone found in the first occupational level has yielded a general age of 500,000 and 600,000 years.
[6] Other estimates based on the association of the Ndutu deposits with the Masek Beds at Olduvai suggest an age approaching 400,000 years.
[6] Gustavo Montiel and Carlos Lorenzo (2023) note that Clarke's initial reconstruction, which was reformed by hand, was littered with technical errors that are more accurately fixed by modern technology, including retrodeformation, three dimensional assembly, and reflection.
After having realized that the morphology of the specimen matched Sima de los Huesos (SH) 5 from Spain, Ndutu was fully reconstructed.
[1] The mastoid process is small, and its posterior part is flat and lies in the nuchal plane, particularly similar to Olduvai hominids 9 and 12.
[1] The frontal bone has an almost vertical forehead, similar to Homo erectus, but unlike the Ngangdong or the Broken Hill crania.
[7] G. Philip Rightmire disagreed with this classification, and believed that its features suggested that it was more similar to the African fossils referred to as archaic Homo sapiens.