Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  In recent years paleoanthropologists have made strenuous efforts to involve geologists in their excavations in the northern section of Africa’s Rift Valley in order to establish a more detailed and accurate framework for dating hominin fossils. Once certain geological strata were identified and dated, researchers were able to focus their attention on various well-defined layers of Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits with the hope of finding in them both australopithecine fossils and those of hominins in the genus Homo.

  It was research like this, into the geology of the African part of the Great Rift Valley, that gave Kamoya and his crew confidence that the land they were now searching might produce fossils in the hominin line. It was a search that could have been successfully conducted nowhere else on Earth. If it were pursued in geological layers of a similar age in Australia or Siberia or North America, nothing would turn up. Hominins didn’t live in those places at those times. It is only here in this geography, employing a group of men scouring the ground with the instincts of professional trackers, that scientists have the greatest chance of success.

  We all knew—the others better than I, of course—which contours in the land were the best to follow, and how to sweep and probe the surface of the land visually. We knew the age of the deposits we were searching, so we had ideas of what we might come upon. In these layers of ancient lake and river deposits, eroded and sorted over time by flows of water, we hoped for one or two crucial pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of hominid evolution that goes back 8 to 10 million years, 95 percent of which remains to be found.

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  EACH MAN’S SEARCH for fossils shifted periodically during the day from moments of intense scrutiny to moments of distraction. If one of the Turkana men who had confronted Kamoya or one of their young proxies was shadowing us, it’s possible that he might have noticed a hominid femur one of us had actually missed. But, being Turkana, he might leave it be and never mention it to anyone, because it was not important to Turkana people. He would be concentrating, for the most part, only on what it was that we were occasionally picking up and not putting back on the ground. They would look at the places where any one of us had stopped and reached down for something, and they would try to figure out what it might have been that had caught our attention.

  I wondered later how these days might have gone had I been traveling instead with five Turkana historians and working hard to understand the trustworthy matrices with which they walked this land.

  Whenever I glanced over at Kamoya, I was struck by the distinctive rhythm of his scrutiny. He would glance up, look away over the arid plain that fanned out before him to the horizon and then look back at the ground at his feet. To keep alert, to better inform himself, he regularly changed his spatial reference. This didn’t mean he would find more fossils than the other men—there was too much chance in the thing for that. But it did mean that he was continually cultivating a comprehensive sense of what we were trying to do—develop a framework, a spatial and temporal matrix, for the big questions each of us, in his own way, carried: Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going?

  Philosophers continually rephrase these questions and, along with the rest of us, speculate on how to answer them. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher, however, to appreciate how hard such questions push at us today or to want to refine the way the questions are posed. I’ve followed men like Kamoya for years, up sand rivers in Australia’s Tanami Desert and across the ice of the northern Bering Sea. I’ve tried to learn from these people. They are acutely sensitive to the shape of the unbounded spaces they’re moving through. They have an awareness of the nested character of the temporal framework that contains them, like a stack of graduated bowls, each set within the next larger one—the time of day, the particular day in a lunar cycle or solar year, all of that situated within a cultural epoch. I enjoy their company partly because they know in any given moment, as I do not, precisely where they are. It gives the best of them an almost preternatural poise. In the vast expanse of the multifaceted unknown, they are certain of their location.

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  ONE DAY WHEN the weather promised to be a few degrees hotter than usual and Kamoya planned to explore an area where the stony ground radiated heat intensely, he suggested I spend the morning in camp. He had a sheepish look about him when he made this suggestion, and I suspected he knew I knew that. He had, in fact, some sensitive business to attend to, and it was actually Richard’s wish that I not be involved that day. I resented being told to stand clear, but understood it.

  A few years before this, Kamoya had found the skull of a Miocene ape in a dry riverbed nearby, at a place they named Kalodirr. Richard and Meave Leakey later discovered several more genera of Miocene apes in these deposits. As the richness of these potentially highly important deposits became more apparent, Kamoya took on the task of trying to improve the boundaries of the search area at Kalodirr. The field trip that Richard had graciously arranged for me to join included some work in this sector, and I assumed he was anxious that word about the richness of the site might inadvertently get out if I went there.

  The field of paleoanthropology, particularly for those who have a stake in one or another version of Homo’s origins, is characterized by unusual levels of suspicion and jealousy. Its practitioners are often guarded and proprietary, especially when it comes to unpublished data and fossils that have not been fully described in the scientific literature. They don’t want to feed speculation before their own formal positions have been set out.

  While one might be tempted to belittle such self-interest (or be amused by the arrogance that sometimes goes along with holding such a position), there’s good reason for guardedness. The discoverers of important hominid fossils enjoy a kind of notoriety and fame far beyond the reach of most academics, and their ability successfully to pursue such expensive, logistically complicated, and labor-intensive work depends heavily on securing grant money. And grant money most often goes not only to high-profile subjects like the search for human origins but also to people whose skill and success make them newsworthy. In short, for paleoanthropologists, securing grant money to continue their work is not all that different from running a successful business in a highly competitive market.

  Kamoya needed to spend his day at a site Richard didn’t want known. I was happy to stay behind, and Kamoya was grateful for my keeping up appearances by agreeing not to go out that day—in the same fierce noonday sun we’d been working in the day before.

  In camp, I collected firewood with Christopher, worked on my notes, and washed a few clothes that had stiffened with salt residue from sweating. At midmorning Christopher brought me a cup of black tea served on a saucer, the way only Kamoya and I were served. (The other men just got the cup.)

  It would be a while, I knew, before Christopher had to begin fixing lunch. I asked him if he would talk to me about his scars. He’s eighteen, the first of us up every day and the last to bed. He’s fluent in Turkana, Swahili, and English. The rise and flare of his large upper lip, his small ears, and his long skull give his face a distinctive cast. He enters into conversation easily with others, whenever his work permits. He works hard to keep our camp orderly and neat, but there is no ostentation in his movements.

  The outer edge of each of his eye sockets, forward of his temples, is marked by a vertical set of three parallel cicatrices, all about three-quarters of an inch long. Similar sets of horizontal scars appear on his chin and on the boss of each cheekbone, and a sixth set of scars, these about twice as long, appear on his forehead above the bridge of his nose. These facial scars, ritually incised during a rite of passage when he was young, have a certain elegance to them, especially in comparison with the other quotidian scars he bears, all of them minor save for a vicious-looking healed cut on the outside of his left knee, from an operation.

  When he left camp to gather firewood, Christo
pher wore a cheap pair of plastic and rubber sandals. In camp, where he went barefoot, I could see the soles of his feet were cracked and heavily calloused. Scars on his forearms and shins, on his knees, and on the backs of his hands were the signs of an engaged physical life. They offered a history of his body, and made his body somehow more authentic, more authoritative.

  Christopher demurred when I asked for details about the ceremony that had given him his facial scars. It was not appropriate, he said, to discuss these things with a non-Turkana person. He spoke to me about the broken knee that had occasioned the operation, but more than this, he wanted to know anything about the United States. What was it like to live there? Did you see movie stars? Did everyone own a car? How hard would it be for him to travel there?

  I might have said that it was inappropriate for a person from the United States to discuss life there with someone who had always lived in a place like Lodwar, because of the likelihood of being misunderstood. Instead, I told him about my home in Oregon, about the dense, towering forest there and the rain, the salmon and black bears, the long drive to town for groceries. I asked him to tell me about growing up in Lodwar. He did. After a while he excused himself and went into the cook tent to fix lunch.

  After he left, I sat and listened closely to the calls of red-billed hornbills, a ubiquitous sound, it seemed, in this particular countryside; and to the twitter of Somali sparrows feeding in the crown of a few Borassus palms standing among the acacias. The birdcalls, in a certain way innocuous, opened the land up into three dimensions, creating a larger scape of reference than the small bolus of domestic space that I’d been sharing for an hour with Christopher.

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  ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I was staying at Nariokotome, Richard flew several of us across the lake in his small plane to visit Koobi Fora, a research camp he’d established years earlier in an area where he’d made some spectacular finds. It was now a permanent complex of buildings. He hoped it would one day develop into a resort of some sort for people who wanted to see this part of Kenya’s Sibiloi National Park. Visitors to Sibiloi, a nature preserve of close to a thousand square miles that includes a crocodile sanctuary, can expect to see an impressive array of wildlife—cheetahs, reticulated giraffes, Grevy’s zebras, golden jackals, leopards, several species of gazelle, and a large antelope called a topi. The park is undeveloped, remote even by African standards, and largely waterless. Periodically it serves as a hiding ground for Somali bandits. Except for those attending college classes at Koobi Fora, few people were visiting this area at the time I was there.

  When we arrived, Richard indicated he’d prefer to slip away quietly from the dozen or so adoring graduate students living there. He suggested we take off on a short trip to the north in one of the short-wheelbase Land Rovers. This would give us a chance to walk over the land together and to talk. One of the things uppermost in his mind at that time—he had just returned from a lecture tour in the United States—was the degree to which attempts to refute or deny evolutionary theory were accommodated in America. He grew increasingly incredulous speaking to me about it as we drove along. He recalled several talks before large audiences at major universities in which it seemed to him the moderator was going out of his way to encourage creationists to offer their views during the question-and-answer period. At one point he became so exercised, recounting one of these scenes, that he nearly drove up an embankment flanking the dirt track we were following.

  I wanted to ask him what he thought of the work of an assistant professor of anthropology at Boston University at that time, Misia Landau, but I didn’t follow up. At the first mention of her name, Richard’s knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. Instead, I posed a less inflammatory question, about Homo ergaster and the evolution of Asian Homo erectus.

  When she was a graduate student at Yale, Landau wrote her PhD thesis on the way the story of man’s origins is usually presented by paleoanthropologists. She argues that their writing is “characterized not by a set of fossils or theoretical principles but instead by a common underlying narrative structure.” It was her opinion that it was this “deep narrative structure,” not the fossils themselves, that accounts for the plausibility of the explanations in these narratives. She found this to be true, she said, both in articles written for professional journals and in the popularizations prepared by scientists for readers with no background in paleoanthropology.

  Emphasizing the relative paucity of evidence upon which to base any reliable paleoanthropological narrative about the origins of man, Landau asserts that “the most characteristic feature of paleoanthropology” is its ambiguity. She argues further that the “form of content [of] the narrative of human evolution conforms to a traditional and explicitly literal model—the hero story.”

  In camp, on that day I stayed behind with Christopher, I reread a paper by Landau, which had appeared some years earlier in American Scientist, called “Human Evolution as Narrative.” It’s partly a scholarly attempt to describe two academic approaches to discussing how narratives work (structuralism and hermeneutics). She’s careful to refer only indirectly to contemporary paleoanthropologists such as Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson, to avoid the charge that her argument is directed against them (the egotistical behavior of both men having drawn comment in professional circles). Instead, Landau sticks to critiquing earlier scientific writers on the development of H. sapiens, such as Darwin, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Grafton Elliot Smith, and Thomas Henry Huxley. But her central thesis is that scientific writing, in particular writing about the origins of man, is not anywhere near as objective as its practitioners would like to believe, that in fact it’s culturally influenced. And in the case of writing about human origins, scientists, she asserts, are writing a story with a known end in mind—the perfection of biological life in the form H. sapiens. These writers, she says, regard all of humanity’s ancestors as “transitional” to modern man; and they treat these ancestors as evolutionary dead ends, as failures. Earlier hominids, evolutionarily complete in the moment and sublimely successful ecologically, are accorded no respect, writes Landau. They’re seen as mere stepping-stones to H. sapiens, as creatures whose protohuman natures have no intrinsic worth.

  Landau’s argument, that paleoanthropologists are as human as the rest of us, that they should enjoy no professional immunity when it comes to trying to tell a credible story, is perhaps too insistent. The story they tell, of course, is a hero narrative, and it is in fact built on a relatively small body of evidence; but in the end, the scientists are only professionally curious people, striving to be rigorous and as touchy as any other group of professionals when it comes to having their stories critiqued by laypeople.

  Sitting there at Nakirai with Christopher, rereading the Landau paper, and swiping away at flies landing on my face in search of moisture, I recalled the thrill of those weeks when I was first in touch with Louis Leakey, hoping to be offered a spot helping out at the Olduvai Gorge camp in the early 1960s. The first time I read Misia Landau’s work I felt a similar exhilaration. Her topic was the lifelong subject of people like Joseph Campbell, author of The Masks of God and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. How, people like Campbell asked, do human beings put into words their ideas about the meaning of human life? How do they convey through art and religion (and for Landau, through science) their beliefs about the significance of human life? They do it partly by investing in certain transcultural stories, like the one about the adventures of a culture hero, which, after a period of trial and hardship, always ends in triumph.

  Many people are familiar with some version of this story, whether the hero is Prometheus or Siddhartha Gautama or Superman. When we hear a story that approximates these stories of a culture hero, we become more comfortable as listeners. We’re more prepared, as Landau says, to believe the story is true. But what if things have changed so drastically in the human world since the time of culture heroes in China, i
n India, and in the Mediterranean that we are no longer really comfortable with such a story? If we have only nostalgic affection for it? In an era of an exponentially expanding human population to feed and decadent wealth piling up in many countries alongside lethal poverty, the culture hero is perhaps no longer relevant, because the scale of the trouble is beyond him. What if what replaces the hero and the hero’s perilous journey is the self-sustaining community? What if we are now at the end of questing for security as we have understood it, at the end of thousands of years of questing for peace and wisdom, in Xia China, in Periclean Greece, in nineteenth-century North America?

  What if the horizons of greatest importance are now, instead, to be found within us? What if we need an entirely different kind of story to sustain us, Jung’s journey or Thomas Merton’s journey or even Aung San Suu Kyi’s journey, instead of Aeneas’s or Alexander the Great’s?

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  ONE DAY MARY Leakey took me to lunch at the Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi. Between the world wars this club functioned as the social headquarters of a dissolute community of British colonials and wealthy idlers, most of them living in an area they called Happy Valley, in the Kenya Highlands north of Nairobi. The club came to stand for all that was imperious and obdurate about the British occupation, including its patronizing and racist views of black Africans. The day I had lunch there, the club seemed cloaked in the assumptions of another era, the preserve of people who were entertained by the ineptitude and corruption of black Africans trying to figure out how to achieve and then manage political independence.