The Sediments of Time

by Meave Leakey

  The following day, I took a train to London and arrived at the appropriate address to find Louis sitting in a heavily curtained, high-ceilinged, and overfurnished living room with Vanne Morris Goodall, Jane Goodall’s mother. This was Vanne’s home, and she allowed Louis to use it as a base whenever he was passing through London. I was extremely nervous, knowing of Louis’s fame, but Vanne Goodall made me feel welcome and at ease. She was a friendly, easy-going lady whom I instantly liked.

  The interview was conducted by Vanne with Louis keeping quiet. I later came to know that this was uncharacteristic: Louis normally talked endlessly and breathlessly about numerous subjects in the most fascinating and engaging way. But on this occasion, he interrupted only when he could no longer restrain himself, interjecting attractive and exciting titbits to encourage me. Vanne Goodall’s questions, on the other hand, emphasized the problems that I would encounter on a daily basis.

  “How will you manage in conditions that are far from comfortable and with little social life?” she asked.

  “I am used to camping and living rough, I love to be on my own in wild places, and I am not normally terribly sociable, so I do not think any of this will be a problem,” I replied confidently.

  “Well, you will certainly see many new and exciting things as well as spectacular wildlife,” Louis interjected delightedly, clearly pleased with my response.

  As soon as I had passed that test, a barrage of other questions came from Vanne.

  “Can you live on a small salary in rather primitive living conditions?”

  “Can you drive a Land Rover on wet, slippery, muddy roads, and what will you do when you get stuck?”

  “When your vehicle breaks down, will you have the ability to fix a mechanical problem?”

  Gratefully and silently thanking my parents for their emphasis on living rough and frugally, for their never listening to any complaints, and for their encouragement of my mechanical efforts on my Morris 8, I gave answers that apparently satisfied this astute interviewer.

  Within a matter of weeks, I was on a plane flying to Kenya. At the time, I never dreamt of where this would lead. I was on the brink of a brand-new career path and a completely different life from the one I had imagined for myself.

  2

  A Change in Track

  I arrived early in the morning. It was August 7, 1965, and I was in Africa for the first time. In those days, the international airport in Nairobi resembled a tiny provincial airstrip rather than the hub for East Africa it would grow into. With few formalities, I was soon through customs and taking in the sights and smells of a whole new continent. Everything felt different—the large horizons, the dusty air, the bright colours, and the sparkling sunshine. I was thrilled at the prospect of living in Kenya for a while, getting to know Louis better, and working at the primate research centre with live monkeys.

  Louis had told me that he would meet me, and I was expecting him to arrive on time in an upmarket car. But I was wrong. Louis arrived late, which I later learned I should have expected, and in an old Morris Traveller covered in dog hair and dust. He wore baggy trousers and a short-sleeved shirt; he had dishevelled grey hair and appeared to be in a great hurry. But he had a constant endearing twinkle in his eyes. As we drove into Nairobi, I had barely any time to absorb the novelty of the passing landscape as Louis talked without cessation in a breathless, rapid voice, outlining the plans for the weekend, which was to be full of action. Louis was entertaining various VIPs, which, as I soon gathered and later informed my parents in a letter, was a catch-all title for “anyone with any influence at all in the financial world, who Louis would do his utmost to impress!” Louis had numerous projects that he was trying to fund. As well as the ongoing excavations at Olduvai Gorge, he was fundraising for Jane Goodall’s studies of the chimpanzees at Gombe Stream in Tanzania; for Dian Fossey’s study of the gorillas in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; for the Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology in Nairobi; for archaeological excavations at Calico Hills, an early archaeological site in the United States; and, of course, for the Tigoni Primate Research Centre where I was destined to spend the next few years.

  Louis kept his word about the busy weekend. As different VIPs came and went, I remained with Louis, who provided constant entertainment. He gave them tours of the exhibits he had built in the Nairobi National Museum (initially named the Coryndon Museum) and showed them his latest fossil discoveries, which he kept in his office there. Louis also took them to Nairobi National Park, where he kept up a constant narrative about all the animals we saw and provided insights about each. I was enthralled by both his knowledge and the fascinating information he offered.

  “Look at those warthogs over there, kneeling on the ground to get their mouths closer to the grass. Why do you think they have those huge warty protuberances on either side of their heads, and why do they have their eyes so close to the top of the head?”

  Then he would explain: “It makes perfect sense. They love to eat the new fresh small grass blades under the short prickly bushes that the antelopes cannot reach. The warts act like pincushions and in the dry season are full of prickles. By keeping their eyes on top of their heads, they can keep an eye out for predators while they have their heads down feeding.”

  We also saw many giraffes in the park, some of which had their legs splayed and were eating dirt. “Giraffes like to eat the minerals in the earth. But in order to get their heads down to the ground, they have to spread their front legs apart. But then, in order to swallow without choking, they have to lift their heads and chew the earth to soften it.”

  Between visitors, we repeatedly returned to Louis’s home in Langata, a leafy and largely undeveloped residential area on the outskirts of Nairobi, to feed the extraordinarily large collection of family pets, including Midge, the baby rock hyrax who had to be fed every four hours. We spent the night among these pets: a beautiful genet cat, several owls, a number of dogs, many cats, and decorative fish in his aquarium.

  As I was going to bed, Louis remarked, “Oh, if you hear a terrible noise in the night as though someone is being murdered, don’t worry. This will be one of the hyraxes, and this is their normal call.” He then added, “And make sure you leave the bathroom door open because the hyraxes use the toilet!”

  True enough, I woke several hours later to the alarming and deafening screeching of a rock hyrax just outside my door! I was grateful to Louis for warning me.

  The highlight of that first weekend for me was a flight to Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania to tour some of Louis’s famous fossil sites. We flew in a small Cessna, and Louis pointed out landmarks as the Great Rift Valley unfolded below us in all its magnificence. First on our flight path was Lake Magadi, the second largest soda lake in the world, white from the soda ash now replacing its water. This was soon followed by the famous and utterly spectacular Lake Natron, with its vivid kaleidoscope of colours caused by algae and enhanced by numerous flamingoes adding an entrancing pink edge around the lake. To the south of Lake Natron, we flew past the flanks of Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active volcano rising steeply and dramatically from the landscape, plumes of smoke belching from its crater. Even farther south, as we neared our destination in the Serengeti plains, we saw the enormous Ngorongoro crater—a majestic circular depression thirteen miles across with a grand rim rising out of the wildlife-studded landscape. I had never before beheld such a stunning, vast, and wild landscape.

  The VIP who joined us on arrival at Olduvai was carrying some huge cameras and was dressed in a black suit, bow tie, and highly polished shoes, and looked most incongruous in the rugged dusty landscape. Louis drove us at breakneck speed around the gorge, stopping at several sites before he took us to his camp for lunch, which included cold chicken and delicious bread, both of which he had cooked the previous night before we went to bed. At the camp, a simple thatched open banda served as the dining and work area while several uniports (metal prefabricated huts) gave some protection from li
ons and other predators at night.

  After leaving the visitor at the airstrip in the early afternoon, Louis told me I should get some practice driving in this sort of terrain. I was delighted. It was my first time driving a Land Rover, and we were driving in the most spectacular landscape I had ever seen. I marveled at the large horizons, the abundance of wildlife as far as the eye could see, and the rich colours of the Olduvai sediments. Though Mary was away at the time, we visited several more of her sites, and Louis then showed me the dam that he had built to provide water for the Masai cattle after a precious hominin cranium had been broken into hundreds of tiny fragments by the feet of numerous cows walking into the gorge to find water.

  “I really am the luckiest girl in the world,” I gushed in my first letter to my parents. The amazing thing is, I have had many occasions in the subsequent decades to repeat that sentiment.

  * * *

  ON SUNDAY EVENING, just thirty-six hours after my arrival in Kenya—although it seemed like another lifetime—Louis drove me to the Tigoni Primate Research Centre an hour or so northwest of Nairobi. I was startled at the change in landscape that an hour’s drive produced. Tigoni, at a higher elevation than the nation’s capital and characterized by a series of hills and valleys, had been initially cultivated by British settlers who established tea plantations that endure today. They form a tidy mosaic-like landscape in total contrast to the wild and dry vastness of the Serengeti plains. From a distance, each tea plant, hand-plucked into a rounded stubby bush with a perfectly flat top, blends into a continuous soft carpet of the most vivid green imaginable that hugs the contours of the hills. And the temperature was considerably cooler due to the higher altitude.

  After such a magical and action-packed weekend, I was a little apprehensive and unsure as to where I would be spending the next few years. However, in the face of Louis’s enthusiasm and warmth, I was confident that whatever I found I could manage. We soon arrived and parked in front of a small house. A tall, blonde, rather wild-looking lady eventually came out to meet us, and she was clearly unhappy.

  “Cynthia!” Louis announced, pleased with himself. “I have responded to your request for extra hands. Meet your new help!”

  He stepped aside, as if pulling away a curtain to produce me. Cynthia looked me over quickly, then turned to Louis who, before she could say anything, immediately added, “Well, I’ll leave you two to sort things out from here.” As quickly as I could have clapped my hands, he was gone, leaving us to do just that. This was the point when I discovered that my arrival was completely unexpected and not entirely welcome. Knowing that the director of the centre would point out that she had neither the money nor the accommodation to provide for me, Louis had simply neglected to tell Cynthia Booth about me.

  Cynthia turned to me. “Well, I have no idea where you will sleep, and I hope that you are able to make do with the minimum of comforts,” she said, before grudgingly adding, “I suppose you had better come in.”

  That first evening was clearly a test. Cynthia put me in a two-bedroom flat that I was to share with a youthful male assistant, Michael Winterson—a solution that was unorthodox at the time but at least provided me with a roof and my own bed. My welcome was made clear to me in the glass of water that Cynthia solicitously brought to my room. The glass contained the largest flatworm I have ever seen. Even after we became good friends, I never asked her about this curious incident. Still, I can only imagine that it was a deliberate act to either test my mettle or intimidate me. To reach such magnificent proportions, that flatworm must have been carefully nurtured for quite some time. But Louis had warned me in London that I would not be comfortable and that conditions would be basic at best. I was primed for far worse than a harmless dead worm in my drink.

  As it turned out, Cynthia didn’t have to worry too much about the cost of new help. I had done well enough in my exams to qualify for a scholarship for a PhD, and Louis let me do research toward this as part of my work, which greatly reduced the size of the salary I commanded. Cynthia was an outspoken lady who had no patience for inept employees or those who complained. She worked hard, and she expected others to do the same. She had two children, who were at boarding school much of the time, and a friendly, easygoing husband, Anthony, who doted on her and made her life livable by fixing the many daily breakdowns of equipment, cages, and cars.

  My job at Tigoni soon entailed supervising the daily running of the centre with Michael. I was responsible for the welfare of all the monkeys, ensuring that they were properly fed and caged, as well as managing the other staff. Whenever a young monkey was not being properly cared for by its mother, I bottle-fed the baby myself. These infants were initially on hourly feeds and later on feeds every two or three hours, which, of course, meant night feeds as well. With more than one hundred adult monkeys and a number of babies, this took quite a lot of my time. The monkeys handled me as much as I handled them, and I was soon covered with bites and bruises. My clothes were also stamped with a very characteristic and not altogether pleasant smell that had rather a lot to do with the urine and faeces they produced. But I loved being outdoors all day and surrounded by animals.

  I rapidly discovered that monkeys have characters just as we do and that some are grumpy and bad-tempered, and others loving and friendly. Louis believed that fertility depends on a good diet, so the monkeys were fed exceptionally well, with a variety of fresh vegetables and whatever fruit was available including papaya, oranges, and bananas, which we bought twice a week from the local market. The colobus monkeys, with their ruminant stomachs adapted to digest leaves, could not eat fruit so the staff would gather green creepers and leaves from nearby farms, roadsides, and woodlands. At feeding times, there were constant squabbles as to who should access the food first, and the dominant cage inhabitant always won. Between meals, the monkeys would settle down to hours of grooming with fewer bouts of squabbling. These monkeys were a daily reminder that we are all primates with very similar behavioural characteristics. It troubled me, however, to see these wild and beautiful animals in captivity. This is a conundrum I have long wrestled with—as a scientist, I am fully aware of the huge benefits that individual captive animals contribute to research questions and medical breakthroughs. But becoming familiar with the colourful and amusing individual personalities of these caged creatures contributed to the weight on my conscience.

  * * *

  FOR MY RESEARCH, Louis suggested that I look at the morphology of the limb bones of different types of monkeys. In characteristically theatrical fashion, he said, “Blindfolded, I can put the limb bones of different species of monkeys in my mouth and tell you what species they are.” Although he never demonstrated this skill to me, I knew that he was right about how strikingly different the limb bones of different animals are. I could see this plainly when I looked at the large collection of monkey skeletons that Cynthia had painstakingly accumulated over the years from all over East Africa. I had learnt from McNeill Alexander at Bangor that different species have different bone morphology because of their different locomotion. Propelling oneself forward on four legs on the ground requires a different set of muscles than jumping and swinging through the trees, and thus, the bones to which these muscle groups attach also differ markedly.

  With this invaluable collection available, I decided to study the limb bone morphology of the two subfamilies of African monkeys—the Cercopithecinae and the Colobinae. Except for vervets, patas monkeys, and baboons, which prefer the more open-country grasslands and bushlands, cercopithecines are mostly forest and woodland dwellers. In contrast, colobines are semiarboreal and spend almost all their time in the trees. I wanted to discover which features of the limb bones set these monkeys apart and what these differences implied. The work entailed taking a lot of measurements to figure out what the key differences were and what might explain them.

  The problem I immediately grasped was that it is almost impossible to sort out which variations evolved in response to the animal’s hab
itat, locomotion, and diet, and which could be instead classified as phylogenetic—inherited traits evolved in earlier lines that may or may not be useful to that species’ survivorship or even have no function today. I had little inkling then how relevant this question would prove to be in my future career studying fossil monkeys and hominins.

  I was fortunate that my old mentor and favourite lecturer from the University of Bangor, McNeill Alexander, agreed to supervise my PhD. With his expertise in functional morphology and evolution, he was the ideal supervisor. But because I was based overseas, I also needed local supervision, which Louis undertook, although he did a lamentably poor job of it because he simply was too busy. Cynthia’s convenient collection of skeletons was carefully labelled and boxed with details of where and when each specimen was collected. She had shot most of these monkeys herself and had travelled from Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania to the slopes of Mount Kenya to do so. Some of the specimens still needed cleaning, which was another smelly job as I had to boil the skeletons for hours to clean them of any remaining flesh.

  Louis also often arranged fresh carcasses for me to dissect so I could study the muscle attachments of different species; these were given to him for his growing osteology collection at the Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology in the Nairobi National Museum. Some were road kills, and others had been shot because the monkeys were raiding crops. These carcasses had a very limited shelf life in the heat of the Kenyan daytime, so I often worked late into the night on my dissections, which must have also added to the potent aromas that followed me around in those days. But I loved it. Soon I believed that I knew more about the differences in monkey limb bones than almost anyone else!