by Meave Leakey
My first field season as the boss was a success. Everywhere we went, we found significant fossils, which encouraged us to return for longer, more concentrated surveys. At the end of the field season, I collected my courage, committed the funds, and arranged to have aerial photographs taken. Then I set my sight on Lothagam as the first place to look for our enigmatic early ancestors who first stepped out of the trees.
Part II
5
Water, Water Everywhere
It was 1989, and I was embarking on my first exploration of the early exposures at Lothagam, determined to find evidence of those early bipedal ancestors. The site is stunning—a dark imposing mountain protruding in isolation from the surrounding plains and split north to south along the middle by a tectonic fault. Since it is one of only a handful of sites known in Africa that encompasses the critical age of around five million years ago when apes and humans split, Lothagam seemed an obvious place to start. An American team from Harvard University led by Professor Bryan Patterson had surveyed Lothagam in the 1960s. Among the many fossils recovered by Patterson’s team is the tantalising mandible of an early human ancestor—proof that they were indeed there. But would there be anything left for us to find?
Lothagam was an even bigger gamble than usual because it is notoriously hard to find fossils there. Erosion at Lothagam happens at a glacial pace because the sandstone is so hard and there is little vegetation to pry open new cracks for the scant rainwater to worry its way through. But Patterson hadn’t had the benefit of my newly inherited and highly skilled team of fossil hunters.
At midday on our very first day, not yet acclimatised to the ferocity of Turkana’s soaring temperatures, I had been cheating. Limp from the fierce intensity of the noon sun, I had been hugging the banks of the Nawata River, a dry sand river that flows through Lothagam only during occasional rains, hoping to avail myself of the occasional shade offered from its steep banks as I made my way back to the others for lunch. Centuries of weathering have carved the deep red rocks into extraordinary shapes and deep gorges. While scenically arresting, they also serve like giant thermal sponges that radiate absorbed heat and block out any whisper of a cooling breeze.
But Lady Luck must have been with me. As I lingered at a shady bend in the river, I spotted a row of fossils peeping out of the sandstone bank at eye level. At my feet, a number of bones were collected in a small sandy depression in the riverbed. Looking more closely, I saw that the bones were unmistakably the fossils of an ancient carnivore. Pleasure, relief, and anticipation washed over me in an exuberant wave—the entire skeleton could well be concealed in the cliff face! Carnivores, being predators at the top of the food chain, are even scarcer than most other fossils, and so are all the more valuable. No doubt about it, this was a significant discovery, and it would earn me the merit badge I sorely needed to seal the respect of the crew in my first field season in charge of the expedition.
My carnivore gave me the final nudge I needed to commit to returning to Lothagam for a full season in 1990. First, though, we had to retrace our steps to some of the other sites we had surveyed in 1989, to collect important specimens and plot their locations on our new aerial photographs and begin to build a picture of that unchartered period when early bipedal hominins roamed in Turkana. We therefore only arrived in Lothagam in early August 1990 to begin what would be the first of five seasons of excavations and surveys. The work at Lothagam was remarkable both for the extraordinary challenges and the unimaginably rich rewards.
We made our camp on land belonging to Mr. Ekuwom, an older man with enormous charisma and an air of great wisdom. He had several wives, many children, and even more grandchildren. Kamoya explained that he was an elder who served as a sort of counsellor or advisor in the community and had become very rich because people seeking his advice paid for the privilege in goats and camels. This is what enabled him to have such a big family—the high bride price for Turkana wives (paid in the form of livestock) prohibits most men from taking more than one wife even though this cultural practice is considered a sign of high status among the Turkana to this day.
We first camped quite close to the northern end of the site in a small dry sand river with very little shade, lots of scorpions, and an extraordinary number of flies. When we finished prospecting the northern end, we moved our camp farther south. The new camp offered more shade and better protection from the wind, but it still served up the same quantities of dust and prodigious numbers of flies. At least one of these tenacious creatures inevitably found its way into my mouth and down my throat every day. The ghastly gagging sensation did not improve with repetition!
At camp, when we were not besieged by flies and heat, it was because of the strong easterly winds that blow off the lake and whip up great volumes of gritty, sandy dust that gets into everything. We spent half our time wishing the hot gale would cease. Then, when it occasionally did, the hordes of flies immediately made us wish it back again.
For a long progression of afternoons, I worked side by side in camp with Kathy Stewart, an easygoing Canadian expert in African fossil fish and a veteran of fieldwork. Together with our field assistant Samuel Ngui, Kathy systematically sampled the Lothagam fish over the course of three field seasons and unlocked vital clues about the ancient ecology from their minute and fragile remains. The two of us were never able to decide which was worse: the wind that threatened to blow our tiny bone fragments away or the mass of buzzing, tickling, pesky flies that made concentrating on the bones extremely taxing.
Richard had always dealt so competently with the logistical side of things that I had been able to focus single-mindedly on research. I am happiest with my eyes glued firmly to my particular obsession: fossils. When I was confronted with a mass of logistical and other practical obstacles, I initially assumed that I was merely experiencing the full brunt of responsibility for the expedition’s safety and success for the first time. Even with a stalwart Kamoya soldiering by my side, it was an onerous burden. But years of subsequent fieldwork showed me that Lothagam regularly served up more testing trials than usual.
Bouts of sickness including several serious cases of malaria as well as various eye infections due to the dust and flies affected everyone in camp. These health issues were compounded by a prolonged period of drought that had drastically lowered the water table in the seasonal sand rivers. The water in a nearby waterhole was consequently brackish and brought on such a severe spell of diarrhoea and vomiting that we were all incapacitated. The only solution was to transport our water for drinking, washing, and cooking from Lodwar, some two hours’ journey each way. With some twenty to twenty-five people in camp, we were consuming two and a half drums, or five hundred litres, each day despite the strictest economy. Although this constituted a considerable additional expense in terms of fuel, wear and tear on our vehicles, and time, there was no alternative if we were to stay healthy.
We even had an anthrax scare after many camels began suddenly dropping dead of disease. In Africa, anthrax does not arrive in a potent, concentrated form prepackaged in anonymous envelopes delivered maliciously through the mail. Instead, it lies dormant for years on the plains in the dried carcasses of the wildlife and livestock that died in a previous outbreak. It takes a sudden rain to bring the highly virulent anthrax spores to life. We bought our meat “on the hoof,” negotiating with local tribesmen who sold us one or two sheep or goats at a time, which we slaughtered and butchered in camp. We therefore worried about what to do in the face of anthrax, but the veterinary officers at Lodwar assured us that goats were not susceptible to the disease. I had not known this before, so I later checked its veracity. Actually, goats can get anthrax, but they are less susceptible than other livestock. The Lodwar officer had been a bit too approximate for my comfort—and we were fortunate that no one caught this serious, occasionally fatal disease.
Without Richard’s regular plane runs with fresh produce from Nairobi, our diet consisted largely of durable canned and dried goods,
rice, maize meal, and great quantities of cabbage, potato, and onion. Laid out on tarpaulins in our shaded store tent, these humble vegetables kept for weeks. But camped so far from the lake with its bountiful supply of fish, we needed fresh meat for the variety and protein it provided our diet.
In addition to the responsibility I felt for keeping my team healthy in the face of these considerable risks, I was presented with a greater quota of vehicle breakdowns than usual. Communicating with Nairobi also presented challenges for me. Some mornings, we spent interminably long periods of time impatiently awaiting our turn to talk on the shared radiophone network used by missions, hospitals, and safari operators across the remote parts of Kenya. After the sun and the temperature soared high, Kamoya and I were at last granted our share of air time. Our patience was all too often rewarded with a message from the operator: “Sorry, Richard says he has had to go to an important meeting!” Sometimes, I reflected grouchily that I should adopt Richard’s efficient policy of never allowing himself to be kept waiting for even a minute. But then we’d probably never communicate at all. I sorely felt his absence as well as the loss of the many practical advantages conferred by having a plane and pilot on the expedition.
Whenever we moved to a new site, one of the first tasks was to locate a suitable flat area and build an airstrip. This is usually hard physical labour involving every pair of hands and at least one hot day of hacking at thorny scrub, shifting large quantities of rocks, and a fair amount of digging. The objective is to level the many bumps and dips on the surface of the strip so the airplane does not land nose-first or belly-up in the dirt with a bent propeller. But the strip at Lothagam was one of the easiest and longest we had ever made. All we had to do was move a few large stones from the flat sandy plain and lay out markers of piled stones splashed generously with white plaster along the length of the strip so pilots could locate it from the air easily. Once the strip was prepared, Richard dropped in occasionally en route to some of the northern parks. The whole crew welcomed his visits, which were invariably accompanied by cartons and trays of delicious fresh fruit and vegetables as well as the inevitable and unequivocal advice on how to improve some aspect of our camp arrangements.
I treasured these weekends stolen out of his busy new life although they gave me a nasty inkling of the enormous stress he was under. Richard had successfully lobbied to have the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department moved out of the direct control of the Ministry of Tourism and stand as a separate entity, the parastatal Kenya Wildlife Service. This reorganisation had been conceived before Richard took over, but there was a lot of resistance to the idea of an armed service with a high degree of autonomy from the army and police, so the legislation had been held up in parliament for some time. But Richard took the view that without an effective ranger force the war on poaching could not be fought or won.
Richard flatly refused to talk about his many problems, and his reticence considerably stretched the new physical distance between us. From what little he did say, I gleaned that there was an all-out war to contain the poaching situation. There were successes, which he mentioned with a hard glint of satisfaction in his voice. Elephant and rhino killings were on a steady decline, and staff morale was up. A new fleet of vehicles was smartly painted in a distinctive olive colour now called “KWS green,” and buried caches of ivory were being recovered regularly through improved intelligence. But there were setbacks too. Rangers were being shot dead in vicious combat, which Richard found enormously distressing. I also had the feeling that Richard was stepping on rather too many political toes for comfort. He needed an armed bodyguard and escort car, and at our home on the edge of the rift valley, elite, trusted KWS rangers prowled the premises twenty-four hours a day to keep him safe.
He told me about the new bright-red Soviet-style hotline phone that sat by his bedside and connected him to State House and a small circle of high officials. There seemed to be a degree of revolving membership involved in the red-phone list, depending on who was currying favour at any one time. And sure enough, Richard’s own red-phone status would later prove to be a very accurate barometer of his political fortunes. The red phone didn’t get nearly as much use as another new piece of equipment, a multifrequency VHF radio that linked Richard to the KWS headquarters and the control rooms of all the national parks around the country so he could be in constant touch with his wardens and rangers.
Our regular telephone had begun making a whole new repertoire of clicks and crackles. When this white noise got overly loud, Richard had conversations with the men who were wiretapping it. “Wouldn’t it be better for all of us if I can hear enough to actually use the phone to talk with people other than you?” he asked them, and they proved surprisingly adept at prodding their peers to fix the problem. We enjoyed uninterrupted service for the first time in years. This seemed truly bizarre and ought to have rendered the phone tap pointless. But Richard judiciously fed these intelligence men scraps of information and misinformation, and discovered that phone tappers have their uses to both the wiretapper and the wiretapped!
I was being fed only fractions of facts too, no doubt to shield me from the grim, grizzly realities. I hated it. Feeling constantly torn between wanting to be in the field doing the work I love and wanting to be in Nairobi with my embattled husband was a new and unappealing aspect of fieldwork. What I didn’t know was that this new tension in my life would only get worse in the years to come as Richard’s career diverged further away from mine into the realm of politics and public service.
In spite of these testing times in our personal lives—along with the array of challenges thrown at me by Lothagam—the rewards of our work on early hominin sites were richer than I could have dreamed. The fossils were exceptionally difficult to find, but committed and patient searching was rewarded by beautiful well-preserved specimens. Patterson’s team cherry-picked the best of what they did find—but they missed a lot too. There were many thrilling days with discoveries of new and strange species and many others that had never before been found in the Turkana Basin. Some of the specimens were so complete that we could reconstruct the whole animal; others were less so, but they yielded exciting new details of the skull shape and dentition of numerous animals that shared the land with our remote bipedal ancestors.
As we became acquainted with the site and started to find fossils, we began plotting each specimen onto our newly acquired aerial photographs so we could return to collect them. I had arranged to have enlarged prints made of the two photographs that covered Lothagam, and these gave us surprising detail. We could distinguish individual trees and bushes, small stream channels, and landmark rocks. Even so, our fieldwork at Lothagam followed years of comfortable familiarity with the Koobi Fora aerial photographs and the years working at Nariokotome in the ever-expanding earth pit where we excavated the spectacular skeleton of the Turkana Boy. So perhaps it is not surprising that I initially had trouble orienting myself in the sixty square kilometres of the Lothagam site. I lack Richard’s uncanny ability to always know exactly where he is; I couldn’t effortlessly separate this particular patch of streambed, sediments, and thistle tussocks from the surrounding vast stretches of the bald terrain. So Kamoya and I spent many a long hot morning clambering to the top of the nearest vantage point to figure out where we were. Sometimes we had to repeat the exercise the next day after getting something wrong. This task became much easier as we grew more familiar with the landmarks, the geology, and the photos.
We also started to go through the records from Patterson’s expedition to try to locate the exact position of his specimens on our photographs using his field-log descriptions. Patterson’s team was not meticulous in their collection methods, to put it politely. They did occasionally use an aerial photograph with a grid measured on it, but there was no scale provided anywhere. I never did discover which photograph or what scale they used even though I devoted a lot of time and effort to trying. To locate the finds, we resorted to following the eyeball
descriptions in their field log, which often proved to be a wild-goose chase. For instance, specimen 328–67K (a hippo tibia that was the 328th specimen to be collected in 1967) is described in their log as being retrieved from “TDS 100 ft N of 316.” TDS is their shorthand for an isolated, curiously shaped rock that vaguely resembles a toadstool and forms a distinctive landmark. This entry put us in the vicinity of the so-called toadstool and roughly one hundred feet north of specimen 316–67K. The entry for 316–67K similarly reads “TDS 100 yards SE of 027.” No closer to establishing where the original hippo tibia was found, we were then directed back to “500 ft SSE of TDS” in the log entry for 027–67K. And so we were referred seemingly ad infinitum to yet another specimen an approximate number of yards or feet away.
We managed to start disentangling this mess from entries where they helpfully mentioned some features that we could still recognise at the site, such as the so-called toadstool. But to make matters worse, it was clear that they had made mistakes—the catalogue occasionally describes something as being to the west of a particular feature when it could only have been to the east. This task was tedious and confusing—but important. We needed to pinpoint exactly which horizon Patterson’s team collected the fossils from. A fossil without provenance—an associated point on a map with accurate geological information about its age—has no value for research. A few of Patterson’s best specimens were marked directly onto a geological map that Kay Behrensmeyer had made, and we managed to decipher where some of the others were located based on the log descriptions, but for the majority, we never managed to figure out locations conclusively.