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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From laboratory studies, Bonnefille later determined that the lignite and other pollen-bearing sediments from the lower Hadar beds were deposited in a treeless marsh lying next to a shallow lake or delta. By comparing the paleoflora with modern flora, Bonnefille concluded that during earlier Hadar times, some 2.9 to 3.3 million years ago, the marsh environment was more like that of the wetter, montane conditions of the present-day highlands than that of the lowlands. By contrast, the conditions during the middle Hadar period, about 2.5 to 2.8 million years ago, were comparable to the arid grasslands or subdesert steppe present today in the southern Afar. She postulated that the shift toward aridity during the later Hadar times accompanied tectonic lowering of the area by as much as a kilometer. A curious find came from a clay layer just below the Pliocene artifact levels discovered in the adjacent Gona area. There, Bonnefille had found fossil pollens from herbs and small shrubs similar to those that grow at higher altitudes, like those found today on the shady floors of bamboo forests in the uppermost Omo Valley. She was unable to explain such plants at Gona. Perhaps the hospitable Janjero people we visited in the upper Omo Valley, who live among bamboo forests, could tell us something about the first toolmakers that the rest of us could not know.
In mid-November, Maurice returned to France with his assistants, leaving a leadership vacuum, which Johanson sought to fill. I would tell the cook one thing; Johanson would tell the cook something else. I would instruct the camp attendants to do something; Johanson would tell them to do something else. No big deal. Concerning the Afar, however, his idea was to turn them into "hominid hunters," like the Kamba tribesmen trained at Olduvai by Mary Leakey. For incentive, Johanson wanted to institute a reward system like that he said Richard Leakey used at Lake Turkana—so much money for a tooth, more for a mandible, a bonus for a skull. The problem was that Johanson did not speak the Afar language, and he had little knowledge of their culture, customs, or value systems. Another problem was that the Afar guards who were supposed to be resting during the day were now spending their time following Johanson around looking for fossils and were sleeping at night.
At the end of November thieves crept into our camp late in the night and made off with clothes, field gear, notebooks, a camera, and a medical kit and supplies belonging to a German doctor then visiting us. One of the field notebooks that was stolen belonged to Corvinus; the other belonged to Johanson. Soon, he began making remarks like "Why wasn't Kalb's notebooks stolen?"
That same morning the doctor, Jürgen Knoblauch, who ran the Trapp clinic at Arba, was summoned to an Afar encampment at Hourda, just east of Hadar, to treat one of our attendants who had returned there gravely ill. Most of Jürgen's patients at Arba were Afar, and he was very familiar with their medical problems. They went to his clinic from miles around for treatment of everything from tropical ulcers to cholera. As a means of ensuring that his Afar patients would return to the clinic for follow-up treatments or medicine when needed, he required that the men leave their rifles or spears at the clinic as a reminder. As a result, every corner of the clinic was stacked with weapons, which added up to one of the more impressive arsenals in the Awash Valley.
I went with Jürgen to Hourda, where we found Mohammed, probably about 19 or 20 years old, lying on a pile of tamarisk boughs in a small clearing in the forest next to the Awash, with the morning sunlight streaking through the trees. Several men were in attendance. Mohammed's gums and fingernails were white. Jürgen's diagnosis was severe anemia, probably caused by chronic malaria and requiring immediate and massive doses of iron, a treatment not available in the camps medical supplies.
Mohammed died two days later. That same afternoon I went back to Hourda and watched from a distance as four Afar men buried him along the forest fringe among other graves. They were covered with dust from the digging, which stuck to their bodies as they perspired in the afternoon sun. After putting him in the ground, they stacked large stones over the grave in a circular mound, as was their custom. Just as they finished a breeze picked up, causing eddies of wind to carry off some of the loose soil around the grave.
I spent much of that week trying to run down the thieves. Using ten or so Afar from the Hourda camp, we followed their sandal prints—two sets—north to the Ledi River, then east, and then south back toward Hourda, where we lost them on the plateau gravels. Close enough: the thieves had come from the same camp as the trackers, which did not surprise me, because they were the nearest Afar around. I then spent two days locating the Afar chief for the area, Melo Seco, who happened to be in Bati. After he agreed to help, I took him back to Hadar, and from there we walked to Hourda in the late afternoon, accompanied by Dennis and our Antiquities representative, Alemayehu Asfaw. There seemed to be about 75 people in the Afar camp. It was tucked into the gallery forest where the nomads kept their livestock at night, grazing them during the day in isolated meadows up and down the river. It was a beautiful spot with the oval huts of the Afar scattered beneath the trees.
The men were waiting for us when we got there. There were about 20 of them standing in a semicircle in a clearing. Each came up in turn and kissed the hand of Melo Seco. The chief talked to them for about an hour as the sun fell below the trees. While he did so, I focused my attention on five or six Afar draped in cloths lying along the edges of the clearing. Occasionally someone would walk up to one of them and say a few words or offer a sip of water. As far as I could guess, they were ill or dying. Surely they were not starving to death from the famine before our very eyes?
Melo Seco spent the night at Hourda, and Dennis, Alemayehu, and I walked the 5 kilometers back to Hadar in the dark. Early the next morning, the chief walked into our camp with one of the thieves and another Afar carrying a few small items that had been taken. The accused was a strong, handsome young man, probably in his late teens, whom we took to Bati and put in jail. We were told that his accomplice was long gone, and we never recovered the rest of the items. The police in Bati said they would hold the young Afar in jail for a month, which was a month too long as far as I was concerned. The incident never should have happened.
That was the first and last time I had trouble with the Afar.
On December 9, 1973, the day before we packed up camp and left Hadar, Dennis and I tied the last fossil locality, L 174, into the Hadar stratigraphical section in the moonlight. We were at the northern end of the basin, racing to finish up our work during the final moments of daylight, when I found what I was looking for: an aqua-colored clay that I had used as a marker bed in the upper part of the section. As we were tracing out the clay to the fossil locality and starting to take a few measurements marking our position in the section, I dropped my prized Brunton compass and watched it tumble down a steep embankment. Like a fool, I immediately charged after it, half falling and rolling down the hill—and in the process burying the compass in the loose sediments that cascaded down with me. Dennis joined men and we searched and searched, digging through the entire hillside until it was fully dark. Finally, we sat down covered in sweat and dirt and laughed. I had waited until the last goddamned night of the field season to lose my compass. We rested a while and drained the last water in our canteens, while listening to the ubiquitous wooo-uph of hyenas that comes with nightfall. Shortly, we realized that it was getting lighter: The moon was rising in the eastern sky. After a little more searching, we clambered back up the hill and finished our work on the fossil locality in the lunar glow.
A few days after returning to Addis Ababa, I picked up a copy of the Sunday edition of the Ethiopian Herald and read,
3-Million-Year-Old Human Fossils Found in Wollo Governorate
So they were hominid after all. Taieb and Coppens read about the discovery in the Paris newspapers. Johanson had given the press conference he had so desperately wanted the previous day at the Antiquities Administration. I had actually believed that he would wait until he compared the Hadar fossils with those in Nairobi or London, as he had said he would. In Lucy, Johanson said that he had no choice but to give the press conference, because by the terms of our agreement with the Ethiopian government, "any fossil deemed important enough to be taken out of the country had to be described at a press conference before removal."
Hardly.
There was a requirement that press releases be first submitted to the Ethiopian press through the Antiquities Administration, not through some other organization in the country. The Ethiopians were as aware as anyone that press announcements of scientific findings prior to confirmation of their significance would be nonsensical. They also understood that more often than not, such confirmations would have to be made at museums or laboratories outside the country. Announcements to the media could then be made anywhere—Cleveland, Nairobi, or Beirut—as long as they were first announced to the Ethiopian press through the Antiquities Administration. In short, the Ethiopians were not imbeciles.
When Johanson's two students conversed with Ethiopian officials, they always referred to him as "Professor Johanson," a title used in the Ethiopian Herald article. For someone who had received his Ph.D. only a few months before, Johanson was rapidly moving up in the world. The Herald also referred to him as "D. Carl Johanson," which is how he then liked to be referred to, apparently to emulate other notables, such as L. Ron Hubbard, J. Edgar Hoover, and his mentor F. Clark Howell. Evidently, Johanson thought this would further distinguish his rising career. Professor D. Carl Johanson. A problem, of course, was that when friends of F. Clark Howell referred to Clark as "Clark," people knew whom they were talking about, but when you referred to Don Johanson as "Carl," people were confused.
But D. Carl had a plan to fix this.
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