The Sediments of Time

by Meave Leakey

  We always looked forward to the late afternoons and evenings back in camp when we could take a refreshing swim and enjoy the cool breeze blowing off the lake.

  Over dinner, we would chat about the day’s discoveries, often enjoying spirited discussions about what they meant and what questions they raised. The evenings were always full. The fossils that we recovered each day needed additional work to remove loose matrix, reassemble broken fragments, and apply preservative to harden the bone. We wrote notes about the day’s activities and finds, and updated our field catalogues. The fossils were then carefully packed for their return over bad and bumpy roads to Nairobi. We did much of this work each evening by the light of a kerosene pressure lamp on a large table in a work tent fanned by the cool wind off the lake. This hurricane lamp emitted a loud hissing sound due to the pressure and attracted an inordinate number of insects considering our arid surroundings. It was perpetually surrounded by a cloud of lake midges and other small flying insects, all intent on death-defying swoops towards the mesmerizing light source.

  Although I had been at Koobi Fora for only a matter of weeks, I was lost to any other life. I had never experienced anything quite so exhilarating, and I was completely hooked on the excitement and allure that this profession might offer. Koobi Fora was remote and rich with an abundance of spectacular wildlife. Great herds of oryx, tiang, and Grévy’s zebra as well as jackals, lions, hippos, crocodiles, and glorious clouds of pelicans and flamingoes were just some of the abundant game that frequented the Koobi Fora spit. It felt as though we were the only people around for miles. I loved the remote setting, the huge landscapes, the quiet, and the knowledge that I had to always be on my toes to avoid hidden dangers. And as I got to know Richard, I knew I was falling in love with him. But Richard was married, and his wife was expecting a child. I was appalled at the idea of an entanglement with another woman’s husband.

  Upon our return to Nairobi in August 1969, Richard and I continued to collaborate on the fossils. I had stopped working for Louis at the primate centre, and my days were spent at the museum poring over the bones and trying to make sense of what they all meant. I moved into a tiny cottage in a leafy lane in Karen, a quiet suburb of Nairobi. My landlady was rather a dragon, and I am sure that she disapproved of Richard’s clandestine visits to an unmarried young lady!

  Despite all the young men who had danced attendance on me in England, I was actually rather a prude. Apart from one serious boyfriend, I had kept them firmly at an arm’s length and often wanted less from them than they wanted from me. I had to keep Richard at the longest length of all. Still, there was no denying the strong attraction that we felt—or that this added to the excitement and magic of those early explorations. None of my boyfriends could hold a candle to Richard—or to his skill and speed behind the wheel. And England’s orderly countryside could not compare to the enthralling scenery that he drove me through or the tantalizing life that a relationship with him offered. Richard’s marriage was not a happy one and was not destined to last, but it cast a dark cloud on what would have otherwise been a fairy-tale story until his divorce was settled.

  3

  Racing Against the Clock

  One day late in October 1970, Richard and I went quietly down to the registrar’s office and were married without fanfare during our lunch hour, with Kamoya as our witness. Our marriage was remarkable for the lack of planning or ceremony. I was sharing an office with a visiting researcher from Germany, and when I came back after lunch a little late and looking happy, she asked me conversationally where I had been. “Oh, I went to get married!” I ventured nonchalantly to her great surprise. My mother-in-law, Mary, was absolutely furious with us for not inviting her as she had specifically said that she wanted to be there when we did this. But in contrast to my mother’s great attention to celebrating anniversaries and special occasions, this total lack of ceremony would be a long-standing feature of my new life with Richard. In any case, I have always felt that the richness of our experiences together far outweighs any fleeting memories that a more elaborate wedding ceremony would have offered.

  Thus began a golden decade. At Koobi Fora, wonders were pouring out of the ground on an almost weekly basis. Although we still knew almost nothing about what these fossils might mean or how old they were or where they fit in the family tree, we knew we were part of something truly remarkable. We tried to get up to the lake as often as we could and thought nothing of a quick weekend trip. We left the office at lunchtime on Friday and drove through the night at a breakneck pace, usually in Richard’s comfortable Volvo sedan. The road diverted through Uganda, and we passed border-post controllers who were invariably drunk. We arrived on the west side of the lake at dawn. Sometimes we then had to wait until later in the day for the wind to die down before attempting to cross by boat from Ferguson’s Gulf to Koobi Fora on the opposite shore. These enforced delays cemented our lifelong friendship with Eduard and Laurette Dandrieux, a young couple who ran the lodge at Ferguson’s Gulf.

  In those days, the road was corrugated sand and gravel rather than the pot-holed tarmac of today. You certainly couldn’t go that fast now, and it is doubtful that a Volvo sedan could make it at all. Nevertheless, to get there in the shortest amount of time, Richard drove like the clappers. One time, he took the road a little too fast and completed a 360-degree turn before we carried on as though nothing had happened—even though this occurred in the Marich Pass, a steep road of hairpin bends that takes you down the Cherangani Hills to the plains of the rift valley below. After one night at Koobi Fora, we set off back across the lake on Sunday afternoon and drove through the night to be back in the office bright-eyed and bushy-tailed early on Monday morning. It was crazy—and wonderful. Those compressed weekends left one as refreshed as several weeks’ holiday anywhere else.

  Like our rushed weekends, we did everything in a hurry. For Richard had a terrible secret. Few people knew that he had been given ten years at the most to live because he was suffering from debilitating kidney failure. At the time that he took over the museum in 1968, his kidneys were seriously compromised by an autoimmune reaction to a throat infection. I was in complete denial. I don’t think I ever truly believed that he would die. Nevertheless, the knowledge of his impending illness certainly added great intensity to our life together. We lived richly and fully, savouring every minute.

  For his part, Richard was determined to cram a whole lifetime of accomplishments into that decade. He wanted to build the still small National Museum of Kenya into a truly Kenyan enterprise, with museums around the country that reflected the rich heritage and diversity the country had to offer. And so he did. When he took over running the museum, it boasted twenty-three mostly European employees and a few small dilapidated buildings housing the main museum along with his mother Mary’s laboratory, some very basic offices for an accountant and a secretary, and limited storage space for the natural history collections. Richard transformed it into a country-wide regional network of museums staffed largely by indigenous Kenyans that reflected many aspects of Kenya’s culture. He significantly upgraded the research facilities too, with improved offices and laboratories for entomology, mammalogy, archaeology, palaeontology, osteology, and geology. Richard also built a bomb-proof, high-security hominin vault to safeguard the priceless fossils that were pouring in from Turkana and other parts of Kenya.

  In March 1972, we had our first daughter, Louise. According to Mr. S. J. Vyas, the museum accountant who happened to be a Brahmin priest, Louise was born in a very lucky time of the stars and was destined to bring great happiness to her parents in their field of life. And so she would! She was followed in 1974 by another daughter, Samira. Because I had no wish to miss the excitement of fieldwork, both children were hauled off to Turkana within weeks of their birth.

  The usual adventures of new motherhood were accentuated in the harsh and remote setting of Koobi Fora. My milk dried up instantly in the heat, and dehydration in the children was a major worry. My on
e and only effort at shared parental responsibility of a young infant nearly ended in disaster. I asked Richard to bottle-feed a very young Louise while I took some visiting friends to see the fossil exposures. Impatient with this as he was with everything else, Richard soon grew bored with the leisurely pace of Louise’s sucking and decided to enlarge the nipple with his penknife to increase the flow. She nearly choked, and I came home to an enraged child and unapologetic father!

  Richard’s more helpful efforts were of a practical nature. He added chicken wire to the windows of our new stone banda to stop the lions and hyaenas from jumping in to seize one of the little ones, who slept slung in a hanging cot to keep cool and safe from the numerous snakes and scorpions that came out at night. Alas, we did not consider the perils from the roof. One night, we were urgently summoned from the dinner table by the kindly childminder we had left with them. He had heard a telltale slapping thump, and his torchlight revealed a large angry spitting cobra that had narrowly missed falling directly into the cot with the sleeping Samira.

  When the girls were young, we took them almost everywhere, and they spent much of their early childhood in a very unconventional manner, usually sitting in a basin of water keeping cool at Koobi Fora or trying to keep up with the furiously fast pace Richard set in the fossil exposures while they looked for their own bones, with little Samira making a herculean effort not to get left too far behind. I sometimes had to travel outside Kenya, and I would leave the children with my sister. Judy had moved to Kenya after completing her master’s degree in potto behaviour at Makerere University in Uganda. The atrocities of Idi Amin’s rule had forced her to leave, but I was fortunate enough to share the new experiences of motherhood with my sister who was also newly married—to a colleague of ours, John Harris, who specialised in the evolution of bovids. Samira would give me an extreme snubbing whenever I left her, making it quite clear how she felt about being left behind. But in spite of the cold shoulder I had to endure, she loved Judy and enjoyed staying with her. They forged an exceptionally close bond that has endured to this day.

  We took holidays on Kenya’s beautiful north coast on the historic island of Lamu, where we first rented and later bought a property. During these brief interludes at the seashore, I was able to indulge my love of all things marine, poking about in tidal pools and spending hours with the children snorkeling on pristine coral reefs and, as they grew older, peering at plankton under the microscope. When the children were old enough, we took them with us on our small sailing yacht as we explored the archipelago around Lamu. For our fieldwork, we continued to explore the rich sediments around Koobi Fora, which we extended with surveys of as many of the other exposures in the Omo-Turkana Basin as possible. Throughout the 1970s, the family of hominin finds from Koobi Fora continued to steadily grow.

  I was in Nairobi with a rather unwell three-month-old baby Louise and trying to prevent dehydration by feeding her five ounces of water with a teaspoon of glucose and a pinch of salt every two hours when one of our most momentous and intriguing discoveries occurred. Poor little Louise got immediately dragged off back to Koobi Fora, glucose and salt in hand, as soon as the weather cleared enough for us to fly out beneath the low-lying clouds and over the edge of the Rift Valley escarpment. Kamoya and his team had found several skull fragments, which Richard impatiently attempted to reconstruct while I hovered over him, itching to get my hands on them. Over the next few weeks, more and more fragments were gradually recovered.

  Much to my relief, Richard gave up before long and handed the puzzle over to me. I have wonderful memories of those days spent in the shady verandah of our banda at Koobi Fora. A young hippo would come every day to play with the drum attached to our boat anchor, behaving more like a seal than a hippo. And I had the indescribable satisfaction of watching the hundreds of pieces of broken bone come together. Before long, I could discern a curiously large-brained, flat-faced, and surprisingly humanlike skull, which came to be known by its museum accession number, KNM-ER 1470. It looked entirely different from the sturdy, small-brained skull that Richard and I had found in the riverbed on our camel safari. Because of its small brain and delicate features, we grouped it together with some similar fossils from Olduvai, which had been named Homo habilis.

  Almost exactly one year later, Kamoya noticed some teeth eroding from the rocky ground of another site near Koobi Fora, which we reassembled into another stunning skull, KNM-ER 1813, that was remarkably different from 1470. Did this curious creature represent another species yet unknown? It was immediately apparent to me that all the fossils that had then been grouped into a single early hominin named Homo habilis would need re-examination because some of them more obviously resembled one or the other of these two iconic new skulls. Little did we guess then how many decades would pass before any light would be shed on the conundrum into our past that these two fossils presented.

  Eleven years elapsed before Richard’s kidneys finally gave up completely, and in 1979, it became clear even to Richard that he simply could not go on without treatment. To live, he would have to either remain on dialysis for the rest of his life or receive a kidney transplant. Those were the early days of transplant success, so the outcome was far from certain. But a life in Kenya as a fossil hunter was not compatible with being tied to the dictates of dialysis. Kenya lacked the facilities, even in Nairobi, to support this choice, and Richard had no intention of leaving Kenya permanently. He opted for a transplant, and all his brothers came forward as possible donors, and his younger brother proved a perfect match. But Philip was standing to be a member of parliament in Nairobi, and the dates of the election kept being postponed. Several agonizing months passed before Philip could come to England for the operation. We moved into a tiny flat near Victoria Station in London, and once I had found a nearby school for the girls, Alan Walker, a close friend and colleague, flew the girls over to join us.

  Alan was an anatomist by training and was working at the University of Nairobi as a lecturer. His extensive knowledge of anatomy and love of fossils had proven invaluable to Richard on many occasions, and they made a complementary team. At times crusty and argumentative with adults, Alan was exceptional with the children. He would handwrite and illustrate amusing stories about animals to distract the kids from the difficult time they were having. Our friendship developed into a strong professional relationship, and he collaborated on many of our most significant fossil discoveries.

  As we waited, Richard became progressively sicker. There were not enough dialysis machines for the number of kidney patients, so it was possible to receive the treatment only when you were on your last legs. It was simply dreadful to watch him suffer. He was constantly so cold that in the height of summer he would huddle on a park bench trying to catch the sun’s rays wrapped in a thick winter coat, scarf, and hat, and attracting many curious glances from passersby. He spent much of his time listlessly lying on the couch while he waited. When Richard was finally pronounced ill enough for dialysis, the transformation was remarkable. Life and energy seemed to seep back into his veins. He spent the hours he was harnessed to the machine writing his autobiography, which I then painstakingly transcribed using an ancient typewriter with a ribbon so well used that it barely left an impression on the page. I have no idea why it never occurred to me to buy a new ribbon—but such simple expediencies were clearly beyond me as I tried to juggle two young children and the need to be almost permanently at Richard’s bedside.

  Although only five and seven, the children must have perceived the gravity of the situation because they were incredibly well-behaved and considerate. But the strain showed on Samira, who lost almost all her hair from anxiety during this terrible time. She would come downstairs in the morning like a rather scrawny and heart-wrenching scarecrow, great balls of hair sticking to her nightie. My father and his second wife, Elizabeth, looked after the children during Richard’s most critical times, and many other friends helped in every way they could. The transplant went ahead at last in N
ovember 1979. All seemed well, and we began to make plans to enjoy Christmas with family members in England and go home shortly after. But just three weeks after surgery, Richard’s body began to reject the new organ, and his kidney function stopped completely. He was administered a massive dose of immunosuppressive drugs to halt the rejection, which fortunately worked. But then he became still more gravely ill. With no immunity to infection, his beleaguered body succumbed to pleurisy. It really seemed that all was lost. As he hovered between life and death, I sat by his bedside through the night, talking to him incessantly and willing him to live. I still don’t know how Richard pulled through this. This was one of the darkest moments of our lives, and I have blocked it out so successfully that I can remember very little else about it at all.

  * * *

  EARLY IN 1980, we resumed our lives in Kenya, and the nightmare of the previous year slowly receded. Just before his kidneys gave out, Richard had been planning a comprehensive documentary film on the many facets of human evolution. Filming began on this stalled documentary, The Making of Mankind, which meant considerable international travel for Richard. When I was able to join him, our times together only underscored our efforts in the field. In China, we visited the site famous for the early discoveries of Peking Man; in France, we filmed the rock art in the Dordogne. At around this time, I was also helping Mary with her book on the emotive Tanzanian rock art, Africa’s Vanishing Art.