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(Warning: this post isn’t full of holiday cheer.)
Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins Of Humankind, by Kermit Pattison, is about three things. It is about the individuals and teams of anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists et al. who hunt the prehistoric remains of human ancestors, hominids. It is about the discoveries that, together, these investigators have made about our origins and transitions from other forms of primates, such as apes, chimpanzees, and monkeys. And it is about the settings in which these discoveries are made in Africa.
(Summary: There isn’t a single evolutionary branch leading to present humans. Rather, evolution resembles a bush with intertwining tendrils. Current homo sapiens won out over all hominids and came to dominate the entire planet in the last 100-200,000 years, for better or worse.)
Players and Teams
In the first place, there are many alliances, formed and broken, among key players. At the center of the book is Tim White, formerly at UC Berkeley, but such an alienating and alienated force that he left the university to create his own research institute.
Brilliant and hard-working beyond belief, White is quick to insult and quick to take offense. He began his career apprenticing with the Leakeys, a legendary family of anthropological entrepreneurs in Kenya whose key members — founding father Louis, his equally legendary wife Mary, and their son Richard — were themselves often at each other’s throats. That enterprise has now been taken over by Richard’s wife Maeve, who seems an altogether more pleasant person. This appearance is conveyed by Meave’s own memoir, written with her daughter, Samira, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past.
Predictably, White doesn’t last long working with the Leakeys and leaves with much mutual abhorrence between him and Mary. He then joins with Donald Johanson, who nearly 50 years ago (in 1974) discovered the then-oldest hominid (more than 3 million years) Lucy, a three feet tall ape-like creature who nonetheless walked upright. Johanson’s bestseller, Lucy: The Beginnings Of Humankind, began the modern scientific and media battle for attention over paleontological discoveries.
But White and Johanson soon too “divorced.” And their battle over the hunting grounds in Ethiopia, where Lucy was discovered, has had lasting consequences for research in the field. In the first place, Johanson’s discovery and avid self-promotion quickly brought him into conflict with the Leakeys, particularly Richard. Then he was banned from exploring Ethiopian territory because of accusations that he was ripping off the country and its inhabitants brought by White and his Ethiopian supporters: Johanson described the rivalry as “two groups that were at each other’s throats.”
As he resumed work in Ethiopia, he found a sympathetic ear in the current antiquities administration—which likewise soon became embroiled in its own series of disputes with the Middle Awash [White’s] team. A series of paleo quarrels entangled other research groups, the local press, diplomats, and government officials amid the already-turbulent politics in the country. At the time, Ethiopia had little tradition of open debate or dispute resolution; personal conflicts tended to fester.
The picture presented of the incessant conflict, rivalry, and backbiting among competing researchers. . . . well, raise your hand if it seems familiar.
Violence in Ethiopia
This academic, professional struggle takes place in an impoverished nation that has largely been at war for decades, beginning with the overthrow of Haile Selassi’s dictatorial government in 1974, the same year Lucy was discovered. The military junta that replaced him was equally totalitarian and oppressive, creating long periods where it was impossible for White and his team, including close Ethiopian colleagues, to conduct their research.
While on site, the team had to contend with warring tribal groups. Although White did form alliances with these groups, many of his key contacts themselves were murdered along the way, including one local friend who might have been White’s most intimate human connection. Then in the middle of their discoveries and analysis of their findings, the two countries that formed after the overthrow of the military junta that replaced Selassie, Eritrea and Ethiopia, themselves went to war.
The picture of inherent, ceaseless human conflict and violence — occurring in a region beset by poverty, drought, and famine — is a depressing vision of the prospects for humankind there and, really, everywhere.
The Human Species
White is himself not a sentimentalist (as you may have surmised). As such, he wrote the seminal work on cannibalism and skull displays by our prehistoric human predecessors.
[Warning: this content is emotionally challenging]
The newly found Herto skulls had fallen into the hands of the expert most qualified to interpret their peculiar markings. But these sapiens skulls did not resemble typical cannibalism. Usually, butchers of humans smashed open skulls to devour brains, which are rich in fat and protein. The Herto pieces had clean breaks from shattering after fossilization. Somebody decapitated the skulls, severed connecting tissues, and broke open the bases just enough to extract the brains—but took care to not smash the rest. Two skulls showed evidence of intentional scraping and polishing. Berhane reassembled a third, the braincase of a child about six years old, which shined with a distinctive patina, suggesting it had been handled repeatedly. It reminded White of ritual skulls from Papua New Guinea. Why would primitive sapiens carry around skulls? Trophies of slain enemies? A postmortem ritual? Memorials to loved ones? It was sensationally lurid stuff, but White refused to speculate.
Where does that leave us in assessing what humans are capable of?
His genteel elder colleague, Desmond Clark, took a more cynical view: such butchered skulls were prologues of inhumanity. “I think they were rather like ourselves,” he opined. “We’re dreadful, and I think we’ll probably destroy ourselves unless we learn to sublimate it.”
This may not be good reading, Holiday or pandemic, if you seek to escape the travails of modern life.
