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
The author, a geologist and founding member of the team that discovered "Lucy" in Ethiopia's Afar Depression, describes the field conditions and camp intrigues during the field season that preceded the discovery of the three-million-year-old human skeleton by Don Johanson in late 1974. Mr. Kalb, then a resident of the country, led explorations in the fossil-rich Awash Valley until he was expelled from the country by the Mengistu regime in mid-1978, accompanying allegations that he spied for the CIA.
Chapter Eight
"Famine and Fame"
At the end of June 1973, I received a telegram from the director of FORGE telling me that I had been awarded $4200, which I would receive immediately, and that the additional $2500 I requested would be given later. Over the next three months I returned to the field and surveyed more areas in the Awash and on the Hararghe escarpment. I was joined at various times by Dennis, Kelati and one Antiquities Administration representative or another, and we were always picking up guides here and there. Since our last fieldwork together, Kelati had married a Tigrayan girl he had met at Camp Arba, who was now pregnant. It must have been something we drank in the Awash, because soon Judy was expecting as well.
We began by surveying areas along the southern escarpment that Schönfeld described as late Miocene, but we found very few fossils and none readily indicative of their age. Much of the area was wooded, and outcrops were scarce. On one occasion, as we were crossing a stream, I spotted a modern human skull at the bottom of several meters of recent river gravels, suggesting that some hapless soul had been swept into a torrent. Another time, we were sitting on a riverbank eating lunch when I realized that human teeth were scattered all around us. Of more vital interest were reports of tribal skirmishes in the area. Because of its geography at the interface between lowland and highland tribes, the escarpment lends itself to territorial disputes. In this case the cause of friction was more pervasive: A widespread drought had struck the lowlands, and the Afar, Kariyu, and Issa were pushing their herds into higher and higher elevations, seeking forage.
Moving down into the Awash Valley, we found dried-up waterholes with dead livestock swarming with vultures. Even wildlife in the nearby Awash National Park was dying. Along the river we came upon recently abandoned Afar encampments littered with the bones of domestic animals, apparently killed as a last resort for food. Up and down the valley the story was the same. Freshly dug graves were present around settlements and towns, and there were reports of widespread cholera and some typhus. I later came down with typhus, and I am convinced that our guide Ali Axinum had cholera when Dennis and I picked him up in Millé. He soon started throwing up black vomit and had acute diarrhea, signs of the disease. We took him to the Trapp clinic at Camp Arba and probably once again saved his life.
The "small" rains of February and March had never come. The drought, apparently part of a larger cycle of diminished rains across the Horn of Africa, caused severe crop failure and livestock loss. The highland towns of Bati and Dessie that we drove through in Wallo Province, the area hardest hit, would eventually fill with thousands of refugees. Relief workers made dire predictions of widespread food shortages. But for myself and many others at the time, it was hard to grasp just how bad the situation was, because by some definitions the lowlands are always in a state of drought. Furthermore, the Ethiopian government did not seem overly concerned.
Over the months I had received a number of letters from Johanson, who in the fall of 1972 had accepted a teaching position at Case Western Reserve University while still finishing his dissertation. His letters concerned his intrigues with Coppens and Taieb, funding, and plans to visit Addis Ababa in the summer before returning to the Omo. Our expedition into the Afar with an expanded team was still planned for the fall. I was particularly interested in discussing plans for the "Center" with him and in learning the specifics of his NSF grant and what support it would provide me. I knew his proposal had been funded some months previously with a reduced budget, but Johanson had not been forthcoming about the details. First he said he was coming to Ethiopia in June, then it was early July; next he wrote to say the approval of his dissertation was held up pending major revisions, and he would not be in Addis Ababa until later in August. Twice I made the long, disruptive drive from the field to meet him, at considerable cost in time and limited grant money, only to receive word days later that he was delayed. In July I took one of his graduate students, Tom Gray, to the field at more expense, and when Johanson showed up early in September, en route to a conference in Nairobi, I was not in a very understanding mood. Nor was he because the problems with his dissertation had killed his plans for returning to the Omo.
We had a colossal blowup.
Suddenly we seemed to disagree on just about everything—from my perspective, his secretive handling of his NSF funding, the disturbing news that Karl Butzer had resigned from the project over related issues, the Land Rover I sold him, equipment, and his relationship with Taieb and Coppens. I accused Johanson of breaking past agreements and causing divisiveness on our team, and he accused me of his own litany of abuses. Shortly he left for Nairobi. On his return several weeks later we more or less patched things up, but from then on I was no longer tolerant of his dark moods and intrigues.
In early October 1973, the International Afar Research Expedition left for the field in four Land Rovers loaded with 18 people: eight Frenchmen, Johanson, his two students, myself, Dennis Peak, an Antiquities representative, a cook, a field assistant, and two Afar guides we picked up en route. Among the French, aside from Taieb and Coppens, were Claude Guérin, a paleontologist, three field technicians, a mechanic, and a documentary filmmaker. Johanson's worst fears had come true: The expedition was "crawling with frogs," and they were going to make a film of it.
Our first stop, Geraru, was a new site Dennis and I had found in July, lying 40 kilometers south of Tendaho. It was only 5 kilometers square but consists of tens of meters in thickness of deeply eroded sediments containing abundant fossils, and numerous volcanic tuffs. The site is bounded on two sides by basalts, the Geraru stream crosses its southern end, and a gravel-capped plateau lies at its northern end, where we made camp. The strata are intensely chopped up by crisscrossing faults that made its stratigraphy impossible to decipher during the week we were there. Nevertheless, the paleontologists and anthropologists collected 200 fossils from 28 localities, which Dennis and I diligently mapped, as part of my responsibility to document each locality geographically. Guérin, an expert on fossil horses and rhinos, and Coppens thought that Geraru was between 2 and 3 millions years old.
That first week everything went smoothly, with everyone collecting things, measuring things, mapping things, taking photographs and notes, making drawings, cataloging, and at night drinking the bottles of brandy and whiskey that people had brought with them, and smoking things.
In mid-October, we moved camp to another new site, Amado, that an Afar guide told me about. Located 45 kilometers northwest of Geraru, Amado is half the size of Geraru and lies in the upper Millé River basin, just south of a 1600-meter volcano called Gura Ale. Amado is noteworthy for its thick, fluviatile, crystalline tuffs containing beautiful translucent fossil wood and hundreds of monkey and baboon fossils. Coppens and Guérin judged the elephants and rhinos to be between 3 and 4 million years old. Some of the associated sediments looked like hot spring deposits, and the fossil wood looked like palm. Together the geology and fossils suggested a proto-Millé River passing through a forested area, perhaps with adjoining hot springs, at the time when monkeys, baboons, other animals, trees, and volcanic ash were swept into the river. By analogy, there is today, at the foot of Fantale volcano in the Afar funnel, a small palm forest surrounding hot springs that drain into the Awash River. Baboons live around the springs, and monkeys inhabit the gallery forest along the river.
In five days at Amado we collected nearly 400 fossils, a quarter of them monkeys. At this point Coppens and Guérin returned to Addis Ababa and then France, where Coppens had urgent business. The rest of us moved on to Hadar, stopping en route at Camp 270 for repairs on Maurice's Land Rover. That night we ate dinner with our German friends in the camp mess and then retired to the "Amoeba Bar," overlooking the Awash, for a few beers. The bar, a small building with a wooden verandah, was built on the hill above the camp by an enterprising merchant from Millé named Ephrem. He made a killing catering to thirsty Germans and Ethiopians and later opened another bar in Bati, in addition to a bar and cafe he owned in Millé.
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