Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression
Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression by Jon Kalb, published by copernicus
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After a few beers, Johanson, Taieb, and a few others retired to one of the thatch huts that had sprung up around the camp. It was here that the "girlfriends" lived—a handful of prostitutes brought in from Bati to help the Germans and Ethiopian highlanders overcome the boredom of desert life. In the semidarkness before dawn, the women could be seen in their brightly colored dresses, returning to their lodgings from the camp sleeping quarters. After checking on the status of our expedition cook, Kebede, who was down with malaria, I joined my colleagues and found them in one of the huts having a grand old time drinking beer, dancing, and fooling around with the women. Just then we heard a terrible ruckus on the road. We raced out of the hut to find Joseph, one of our guides, fully drunk and sitting behind the wheel of Maurice's Land Rover, with the motor running. Somehow Joseph had pinched the keys, apparently from the repair shop, and had been driving around camp crazily until he was stopped by one of the Germans, who was trying to coax him out of the vehicle. Maurice instantly appraised the situation and flew into a rage, dragging Joseph out of the Land Rover and screaming at him as Joseph screamed back.
Now, Joseph was my prized linguist. I had hired him during the summer because he spoke the languages of the Hararghe escarpment: Itu Oromo, Adere, Somali, and Afar, as well as Amharic, Greek, French, English, and some German. As he explained it to me, his mother was part Itu and part Somali Issa, and his father was part Afar and part Greek from Dire Dawa, the largest town in Hararghe, where Joseph was born and where Adere is spoken. There Joseph received a secondary education and learned English and French. Later he moved from town to town on the escarpment with his father, who worked for the French-run railroad. I met Joseph in Arba, where he had been employed for several years by the Trapp Company, just after they had fired him for drinking, a problem he apparently still had. Another problem: When he got drunk, Joseph could never keep his languages straight, so when he was yelling at Maurice that night he sounded like a meeting at the United Nations.
The next morning I had a heart-to-heart talk with Joseph and fired him. I liked Joseph and later saw him on occasion in Addis Ababa, where he sometimes worked as a tourist guide. From time to time he would drop by the office when he was out of work. I would hire him for the odd chore around town, and he would further my knowledge of Ethiopian ethnography, about which he knew much. The last time I saw him, he greeted me as he was coming out of the Hilton Hotel while escorting some elderly German tourists. He had picked up a sport coat somewhere that was about five sizes too big for him. Joseph may have been imperfect, but the man was unique. And the disruption he caused that night at Camp 270 probably saved some of my colleagues from catching the clap.
We stayed at Hadar for nearly two months; expedition members and visitors came and went. Our sprawling camp with my large open work tent in the center overlooked one of the widely looping meanders of the Awash. The view north was of the Hadar badlands; to the south we overlooked the steady, brown waters of the river, its sentinel forest, and the distant hills in the greater Meshellu basin. I thought Hadar was beauty itself, with all of its mysteries and promises of discovery at arm's length. It was not really a question of "making a discovery" at Hadar; rather it was a matter of which one you chose to record in your notebook, or in the fossil catalog, or on a map. There were also the smells of the Awash to take notice of, the chill left over from nightfall, and the scarlet sunrise creeping its way across the eastern sky at dawn.
I was never happy about our scientific method on this expedition—people running around collecting fossils, carting them off to camp, and then moving on to the next locality to collect more fossils. All the while, Dennis and I were playing catch-up to map the geographical and stratigraphical position of fossil localities. Sloppy stuff, and Geraru was the worst. With the multiple faults there, we scarcely had a clue as to where we were stratigraphically from one locality to the next. Ideally, the stratigraphy should be worked out before fossils are collected, making it possible to pay greater attention to geological context. I was determined to make stratigraphy my first priority at Hadar. Maurice and I were supposed to do this together, but he had a problem delegating authority and was always bouncing around attending to vehicles and supplies and keeping his field assistants busy.
Hadar is cut by a modest number of faults, by Afar standards, and is not complicated in this respect. Nor, unlike Amado, does it have the complex time breaks or unconformities; that is major pieces of the geological section are not eroded away, except in the uppermost levels. Hadar is what geologists call "layer-cake geology." The strata are nearly flat-lying, and distinctive marker beds used for correlation purposes—tuffs, sandstones, shell beds, and colored clays—can be traced over wide distances. Using a 2-meter piece of string with knots tied in it every 10 centimeters, a measuring stick, a compass and level, and an army shovel, it took me two weeks to determine that there were approximately 160 meters in thickness of exposed strata in the main Hadar area.
By the end of the field season, Dennis and I had mapped the location and stratigraphical position of all 79 fossil-collecting localities that had been established. Fossils recovered from Locality 120, for instance, were eroding from a thick sand layer 9 meters below a distinctive green clay in the northern part of the site; fossils from Locality 131 were eroding from sands directly above a gray clay in the southern part of the site; and so on. All told, we measured and described 51 geological sections that we correlated from one place to the other using 17 marker beds. Because Maurice returned to France midway through the field season to complete his dissertation, the description of the Hadar stratigraphy contained in his dissertation was far from complete. When he finally published the stratigraphy of Hadar three years later, it was nearly identical to the version I had given him at the end of the 1973 field season. At the time, such differences in our work product was not an issue: I understood the limitations on Maurice's time and, especially, the continuing distractions caused by Johanson.
Don was an unending source of divisiveness and tension in camp, except at night when he was stoned. Then he would relax by sitting around the work tent spewing out his latest gossip or dirt about researchers far and near. Johanson was unsurpassed at saying something in an offhand manner, with just the precise amount of innuendo. On one occasion, he told an elaborate story about how a Belgian geologist working in the Omo with the American team mysteriously lost his field notebook, "just as the time that Coppens was visiting camp . . ." More than once his stories would gravitate to Richard Leakey. Johanson was beside himself over Richard's latest headline-making find at Lake Turkana, the famous "1470 skull" of an early Homo, announced in November of 1972. Named after its catalog number, the skull helped confirm one of Louis Leakey's career doctrines, the great antiquity of the genus Homo, originally reported from the lowest levels of Olduvai. Johanson reveled in Richard's subsequent problems in dating 1470, which was first dated radiometrically at 2.6 million years but was later proved to be 700,000 years younger.
Looking back for insights that might explain Johanson's particular disdain for Coppens and Taieb, I recall one early episode that I thought was especially telling. On occasion at night, Johanson would bring out the novel he was reading, which that season was The Stranger by Albert Camus. One evening he asked Coppens to explain a particularly complex passage to him.
"Ah, but you must be French to understand that book," Coppens said.
Later, when Johanson asked Taieb about the same passage, he replied, "Ah, but you must be Algerian to understand that book."
Some days went by, and again and again he would ask Coppens or Taieb questions about the book, and always he would receive the same answer. "Ah, but you must be . . ."
I could sense Johanson's frustration and anger. Then one morning, just before daybreak, I was crawling out of my mosquito net when I heard two people near the cook's tent engaged in heated discussion. It was too dark to see, so I crept up to listen. I was taken aback to recognize one of the voices as Johanson's, because he was seldom up before breakfast. "You must explain that passage to me," he was saying, "or you will be sorry, very sorry."
"But Mr. Don," the other voice replied, "I haven't read the book. I don't even read!" What the hell? I realized he was talking to Kebede, the cook! I was shocked.
"You're lying, I know you can read! I've seen you reading grocery lists," Johanson hissed.
"No, Mr. Don, please, another time, please. I'm begging you, I must fix breakfast for the camp."
"I warned you, Kebede, I warned you!"
Realizing that something terrible was about to happen, I leaped from behind the tent just in time to see Johanson spit into the pancake batter.
"No, Mr. Don—no, no, you'll poison the entire camp!" Kebede screamed.
At that moment I awoke covered in sweat. God, I had been having a horrible nightmare. But just to make sure, I got up to check on Kebede. Sure enough, there he was, just getting out of his tent to start preparing breakfast.
At the end of October, Maurice and I loaded two vehicles with colleagues and crew and left to survey areas west of camp along the Gona and Busidima rivers, leaving Johanson alone at Hadar for the first time, with his two students. From the Busidima, Maurice and I made our way north to the Bati-Assab road and then drove up to Bati on the escarpment. There I called Judy to check on the status of two more expedition participants who would be joining us: Maurice's colleague, paleobotanist Raymonde Bonnefille, and Gudrun Corvinus, the German archeologist Maurice had recruited at the 1971 Pan-African Congress. Both had arrived in Addis Ababa on schedule and were staying with Judy. Over the telephone, we made arrangements for Maurice to meet Gudrun and Raymonde at Camp 270 in two days. The next morning, October 30, Maurice headed for the rendezvous, while Dennis and I returned to Hadar.
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