Louis Leakey then clambered out of the Olduvai Gorge where he had been prospecting for eighteen years, and he brought undeniable news.
Olduvai is a Masai word for the sansevieria plant which grows wild in that area.The gorge is about 25 miles long and 300 feet deep: a parched canyon where anthropologists, rhinos, cobras, and black-maned lions go about their business in dignified solitude, except for an occasional truckload of apprehensive tourists from Nairobi. It is a splendid place to study human evolution because quite a lot was happening here and because erosion has made it possible for scientists to get at the remains.
Archaeologist Hans Reck commented in 1913: “It is rare for strata to be so clearly distinguishable from one another as they are at Olduvai, the oldest at the bottom, the most recent at the top, undisturbed by asingle gap, and never indurated or distorted by mountain-building forces.”
Leakey, with his wife Mary, camped season after season at the edge, walked down into the gorge looking for bones, and shared a water hole with various large animals. “We could never get rid of the taste of rhino urine,” he said, “even after filtering the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon.”
He sounds like the natural descendant of those nineteenth-century British explorers, men and women both, who marched presumptuously in when common sense should have kept them out. Eighty years ago one of his aunts arrived at Mombasa with the idea of touring the continental interior. Local officials, aghast at such madness, told her to go home; instead, she took a firm grip on her umbrella, hired a string of porters, and walked to Uganda. No doubt she approved of a nephew who chose to spend his life associating with dangerous animals and fever-laden mosquitos in the serene conviction that none of them would dare interrupt his work.
Leakey’s first diamond in the rough was, as we might expect, a chunk of somebody’s skull. It looked human—if compared to Dart’s semihumanAustralopithecus—and was about 750,000 years old. This, as professionals say, hardened the evidence that the African evolutionary line had continued. Leakey’s man fitted nicely between ourselves and Dart’s bone-wielding cannibalistic baboon killers.
Between 1961 and 1964 the Leakeys uncovered some two-million-year-old bones. The skulls indicated a large brain and the reconstructed hands looked altogether human. But we have trouble granting the existence of humans two million years ago—humans of any sort—not to mention those who may have been sophisticated enough to invent a device still used by various people around the world. By Argentine cowboys, for example, and by Eskimos who use it to capture geese and ptarmigan. That is, the bola. For there is evidence in the form of stone spheres from Bed II at Olduvai that those people used bolas to hunt animals. The spheres, which have been deliberately worked, are the size of baseballs. They might have been nothing more than hammers or clubheads, or balls meant to be thrown individually, though it would bestrange to spend so much time shaping an object that could be lost. The reason Leakey suspected they were bolas—the stones encased in hide and connected by thongs—is that they often are found in pairs, or in sets of three.
It’s a bit staggering to think that bolas may have been whirling across the earth for two million years.
A number of occupied sites have been located. At one of them the debris forms a curious pattern: a dense concentration within a rectangular area fifteen feet long by thirty feet wide. Outside this rectangle practically nothing can be found for three or four feet in any direction. The ground is bare. Then, beyond this vacant area, the artifacts show up again, though not as many. The explanation is simple. The littered rectangle was their home, surrounded by a protective thorn fence. Trash was tossed over the fence.
At another site there is a ring, about fifteen feet in diameter, consisting of several hundred stones. Occasionally the stones form a mound. The Okombambi tribe constructs shelters like this. For two million years they’ve been doing it. The mounds of rock support upright poles over which grass mats or hides are stretched to break the wind.
So the chronicle of humanity continues to lengthen. Now and again this record is frankly reassuring. In 1966 on the French Riviera, while a hillside was being excavated to make way for some luxurious apartments, the site of an ancient encampment was revealed. And there, 400,000 years old, lay a human footprint. It tells as much as anything. The footprint proves that we have tenure on earth as certainly as the whale and the crocodile. We, too, have taken part in the grand scheme.
Flipper-bearing lungfish moved ashore in East Africa—in East Africa or some other warm forest-clad land—where they turned into tree shrews which turned into apes. Then, fifteen or twenty million years ago, presumably when forests were dwindling because of a change in climate, some adventurous or desperate apes moved from the trees to the savannas. Here, anxious to see what was happening, because it could mean life or death, they spent most of their time upright.
And on the plain, unprotected, they learned the value of tools and the use of fire.
After that it was downhill all the way, or uphill—depending on yourestimate of mankind—from omnivorous thighbone-wielding assassins
