by Barry Lopez
Maps held me in thrall when I was young. They combined, in a single two-dimensional space, both the broad all-encompassing reality that a great journey makes possible and the particularity of those places along the way that comprise the journey. To behold the map is to imagine, in the same instant, both the arc of the journey and the moments that will make it up. This, to make a bit of a leap, is part of the genius for me behind Monet’s impressionistic representations at Giverny. The unfocused colors of these sketch-like images mimic the sketchiness of one’s general recollection of movement through a particular geography, while at the same time the painting consists of myriad discrete dabs of color. One of Monet’s contemporaries, Camille Pissarro, painted panoramas of Parisian streets that work before the eye in the same way maps do: you appreciate the entirety of the area and, simultaneously, its discrete components.
Travel, to my mind, can become a type of mapmaking. As a young man I read Darwin as much for the epic journey he describes in The Voyage of the Beagle as for his thoughts on how living organisms change through time while proceeding in no predetermined direction. I later read James Cook because I was attracted to and admired his disciplined effort to travel deliberately, and also for the way traveling had taught him about the world. I read the biographies and autobiography of Ranald MacDonald because his quest for identity made him a different sort of traveler than explorers like Cook or Tasman or Matthew Flinders.
Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another. Traveling encourages the revision of received wisdoms and the shedding of prejudices. It turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity. It helps one understand that all people do not want to be on the same road. They prefer to be on their own road.
Darwin taught that, like the panda or the thresher shark, Homo sapiens is an animal without a destination, and like all other animals is known only in its present form, a transitional form, even if that form, like the coelacanth’s, is stable for a long period of time. Modern humans are part of a continuum that stretches from Homo heidelbergensis, some 250,000 years ago, to a descendant standing up ahead of us, invisible in the ether of the Anthropocene.
No other creature, as far as we know, is as focused on identity and destiny as Homo sapiens. The desire to have special meaning in the world is one of the reasons I think humans search so diligently for the bones of their ancestors. The mere fact that they existed and are somehow related to us is reassuring to an animal that tends to view itself today as a barely tethered balloon reacting to the rising winds of accelerating cultural change. Many of us are not adapting smoothly to a rapidly changing world, especially psychologically. Our ancestors offer us historical meaning, but they give us no indication of the future. And what is true for us is true for every other animal: no matter our impressive history, every day we advance figuratively into evolutionary darkness. And, because we are inescapably biological, we have no protection against extinction.
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I ARRIVED AT Nakirai carrying as little prejudice about the origins of man, I hoped, as was possible. (I trusted my experience there would have its own logic, that I need only be attentive and prepared to participate.) Over the years, camped with researchers in the field in different situations, I’ve found it helpful to maintain a curious instead of a skeptical frame of mind, at least initially. The world, I think, is mysterious at a fundamental level; and we’re free to engage with it at any depth we wish, free to listen to any serious intelligence trying to make (usually limited) sense of the world’s mysteries—the pi meson, the nutritional needs of a black rhino, the psychology of the Thule. And we’re free to be enthusiastic about any human effort to comprehend humanity’s place in the world, no matter who does the comprehending. The quest for a state of equipoise, of balance in the face of the paradoxes and contradictions that come with chaotic cultural forces, seems to be more valued in times of great stress than the overconfident pronouncements of authoritarian professionals, who too often seem only to encourage or suppress panic or fear in their listeners.
It’s good to know where you come from, so that you do not live as though you’re lost, someone wearing a mask of confidence but feeling no measure of assurance—about anything.
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IF THERE IS a trick to a search for the meaning of a particular fossil bone, it’s that in order to perceive what no one else has seen there, it’s necessary to overcome one’s preconceptions, to shift one’s point of view, to give up orthodoxy. The capacity to do this is what, for me, not to belabor the point, constitutes part of the genius of Cook. He sought to navigate where others had been satisfied merely to sail. And it is part of what distinguishes Darwin as well, a man who stepped away from more than one kind of orthodoxy.
One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in.
A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.
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THE DRIVE FROM Nariokotome to Nakirai through the village of Lodwar, setting up our camp, and dealing with the Turkana men brought us nearly to the end of the day. Christopher made supper, and after we ate, I asked Kamoya if he had a few minutes. We’d gotten to know each other the week before at Nariokotome, but that was in a camp being run by someone else. This was his camp. I wanted to understand how things might go best here. Kamoya was both fraternal and avuncular where I was concerned, and I understood I had plenty to learn. In a certain sense, I really didn’t know where I was, and we were about to plunge into a time—mostly the early Pliocene—that was floating free for me, conceptually, and was therefore nebulous.
The work itself was complex, a combination of abstract awareness and empirical proficiency. In a couple of days Wambua would find a late Miocene hominid tooth, a dark bluish-gray object with a weak sheen to it, indistinguishable to most people from a random piece of polished quartz. It was a spectacular and important find, there being a gap of some one million years in the late Miocene fossil record for hominids. It is still hardly comprehensible to me at this point that an animal dies, that scavengers scatter its bones, that some of them end up in a river where they are eventually buried under layers of sediment; and that over millennia minerals in the sediment slowly replace the organic molecules in the bone, creating a fossil. Some six million years after a primate dies of a heart attack or is killed by a predator, a man in khaki shorts and a blue-gray short-sleeve shirt bends over it with a stick. He nudges undistinguished bits of gravel aside to fully reveal one of the animal’s lower left premolars.
Wambua was a person who knew where and how to look, and who often was aware right away of the significance of what he saw.
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EACH MORNING we head out at about six-thirty in the Land Rovers, leaving Christopher behind to mind the camp. Each da
y we search another large, undemarcated tract of open land on foot. Most often we line ourselves out six abreast, about twenty feet apart. When we encounter dry water courses with eroding banks, we concentrate as a group on these banks, because fossils frequently emerge here. Like the unperturbed drifts of the Grevy’s zebras we sometimes see grazing around us, our movements conform to the contours of the land. I adjust my pace to the movement of the other five, searching my assigned ground, but I look up regularly to mark the heading and pace of my companions. I’m usually working off somewhere to Kamoya’s right. We walk in silence, and I’m conscious of not breaking Kamoya’s concentration every time I have a question or come upon something that seems interesting. But if anything looks promising I alert him.
I carry my notebook, a water bottle, a small tape measure, a pocketknife, a compass, my binoculars, a first-aid kit, sunscreen, and an extra pair of sunglasses in a small day pack. The others carry nothing but versions of the same type of stick I use, made from the peeled branch of a toothbrush shrub. The stick is about two feet long and straight, but it’s been cut in such a way as to leave a short spur, the base of another branch, resting across the palm of one’s hand. The distal end of the stick has been sharpened to a blunt point. Onyango shows me how to make one, and with beginner’s luck, it turns out very well. Wambua offers to trade his stick, which is not quite so straight, for mine. I agree, believing the favor will be repaid some day.
Each man has his own technique for searching effectively. Onyango moves slowly, hesitating, with the deliberation of a heron stalking fish in shallow water. He’s the only one in camp besides myself who reads regularly. Ngeneo moves with impatience, swiping at the ground with his stick and looking away distractedly. He is always the first up in the morning after Christopher and often whistles while he’s searching. Kamoya, a stout man with a large head, moves confidently and calmly, like a bull among heifers, the bridge of his bifocals usually riding far forward on his nose. He looks up from the ground and out around him in a regular rhythm, alternating with his intense concentration on the ground immediately in front of him. Wambua moves slowly, like Onyango, but with his hands clasped behind his back, pausing briefly to study a single patch of ground and then another, and sometimes bringing his stick around to poke sharply, as though he meant to wake up a stone. Nzube, a small-boned, diminutive man with a high forehead, covers more ground than anyone. His eyes jump very quickly from spot to spot.
During our days together, each of these men will make a significant find, which suggests that no single approach in the search for fossils is superior, or that almost any method will lead to success. The indispensable element in each man’s scrutiny of the ground is his ability to recognize what is important, to differentiate quickly between what is significant and what is merely interesting. In the first few days working alongside Kamoya, I struggle to develop the right search images, to separate the metal from the dross. But I’ve done this before, searching for meteorites amid other similar-looking rocks in Antarctica, and looking for bits of grain in sandy soil at Ancestral Puebloan sites, in the American Southwest. It takes a few days of intense concentration, and then I, too, am able to recognize what the others are looking for.
Depending on what we discover at any particular place, we might come back again the next day or move on to another area. How much time we spend at a particular place depends on the geological age and richness of the fossil beds there. An astonishing aspect of the men’s work, to me, is that most of them can recall precisely where they found anything of note. One day I found what I knew by then was part of a hippopotamus skull. Unless we found a hominid fossil close by, I knew it would be unlikely that anyone could raise the funds necessary to excavate this hippo, but I was surprised when I called Kamoya over to see it that he seemed to take only cursory notice. Three or four days later, however, when we were working nearby again, he walked straight over to the hippo fossils from several hundred yards away. The fossil bone fragment I’d found wasn’t apparent to the eye on that level plain of ground, dotted with brush, until you were standing right next to it. I couldn’t identify the markers he was using to navigate successfully to this spot, over what, to me, seemed undistinguished ground.
He said he wanted to examine the hippo more closely.
On another day, when the heat of the afternoon sun was driving us off a couple of acres of dark cobbles, and I would have said we were still several miles from the vehicles, Nzube led us toward a rise, over barren ground as anonymous to my eye as the surface of the ocean. When we topped the rise, I saw our vehicles just below—“cars,” they always called them—with canvas bags of cool water hanging from the side mirrors.
Once I got better at recognizing fossils, I felt more comfortable accompanying the others on these searches, and Kamoya began to share more details with me about what was going on around us at any particular place. He’d describe its geological history, saying, maybe, that four million years ago this or that place was a swamp or a savannah. Soon I could identify carnivore teeth, crocodile skulls, upper and lower turtle plastrons, bovid mandibles, fish bones, and slender strings of tiny rocks that were in fact the intact vertebral columns of small rodents. One day Kamoya came over to me with a molar. “Hominin,” he said, but with so little enthusiasm I was puzzled. “Maybe a couple of hundred years old,” he continued. He walked back to his search line and dropped the tooth where he’d found it. I brought him a bone from a large fish once, a lightly constructed plate with radial struts. It looked something like a mammalian scapula. I left my stick behind, standing up at the find place. The bone had mineralized in such a way that the iron oxides in it gleamed in tiny spots of color across its surface, iridescent hyacinth blue, mauve, indigo, the pale purple of lilacs, and the dark purple of eggplant.
Kamoya examined it with appreciation and then slipped it into my shirt pocket. “Lots of fish around here,” he said.
On another occasion Kamoya brought over a giraffe tooth to show me. While I turned it over in my fingers, trying to absorb its distinguishing diagnostic characteristics, I caught the slightest movement of Kamoya’s chin, indicating something in the distance. I tried to take in whatever it was with a sidelong glance—two Turkana boys following us, a third of a mile away, trying to stay out of sight.
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WE RETURNED TO Nakirai, the Jackal camp, about one each afternoon for lunch, which Christopher would have ready for us. He got up to make breakfast in the dark and we ate it quickly, during the first few minutes after sunrise, before hundreds of flies were shaken out of their night stupor by the warming air and drawn to the moisture in our food. Christopher slept in the cook tent; the rest of us slept in the open on thin mattresses, side by side on a large green tarp. Christopher never wore shoes in camp; the others went barefoot as well, but put on sandals before we left for the day. I switched from flip-flops to a stouter pair of shoes before leaving camp, and put on sunscreen. One morning Wambua stared at a nonexistent watch on his wrist with a look of exasperation as I delayed everyone by applying sunscreen, which they of course didn’t need. We laughed.
During the hottest hours of the day, after lunch, we’d drift apart, the six of us, most to take a nap. I’d catch up on my notes for the day, go back to reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa. Kamoya might be on the radiotelephone with someone at the museum in Nairobi or be playing checkers with Nzube or Onyango. Wambua, a muscular, broad-chested man with a thin mustache, who squinted and spoke rapidly and passionately about things, might be lying supine on his bedding, smoking a cigarette. He, Nzube, and Ngeneo are the only smokers. At dawn, Wambua smokes a cigarette quietly before rising from his sleeping pad.
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LATE MOST AFTERNOONS Turkana families approached our camp, walking in out of the arid lands where they live and graze their livestock. They squat at the periphery, watching
us closely as we go about our business. If we approach them, they begin to complain in Turkana of illness, of their need for transportation to Lodwar. Someone back at one of the bomas has been bitten by a puff adder (akipoon, in Turkana) and needs attention. A baby, perhaps malarial, is held out to Nzube, as though he were capable of magic. They ask for shoes, shirts, pants. Twenty or thirty of them are still there, silent, staring quietly at us from the dark when we go to sleep.
Kamoya is always gentle with the Turkana people, whose curiosity and desires are constantly before us, but he’s firm in his dealings with them. One evening he explains to me how he manages his compassion, the impulse to be generous. In fact, we have very little extra of anything in our camp. We have a few five-pound bags of millet, which Kamoya sometimes trades for a goat to slaughter. He drives very hard bargains, and there are always displays of disbelief, outrage, disgust, and bafflement on the other side during negotiations.
One night I notice a young woman massaging her forehead in a way that makes me think she has a headache. She is wearing traditional clothing and a garrote of interwoven bead necklaces, three or four inches high, as well as several brass arm rings. She’s sitting on a log with some other women. Kamoya, when I ask him, says it’s all right to offer her some of my aspirin. I bring Christopher with me to interpret. She says yes, she has a headache, but when I offer her two tablets, an older woman seated next to her says something to Christopher. He turns to me. “She says, ‘We prefer to lack it.’ ” What she means, I understand, is that people like myself tend to view people like her as “lacking” certain things, but that sometimes they actually prefer to lack them. What I regarded as an act of charity is, for her, an opportunity to decline those things that might lead to compromises in her life.