The Lost Forest

by John Francis Kinsella

  Chapter 44

  THE JERUSALEM MUSEUM

  The road to the frontier wound through a parched mountainous landscape that led down to the Dead Sea, 360 metres below the Mediterranean. The eastern shore lay to the left flanked by a sun devastated panorama of red rock strewn with the dust of time.

  The taxi Ennis had booked the previous evening at the Amman Intercontinental dropped him at the frontier post on the east bank of the Jordan River. He had arrived the previous day by Gulf Air in the Jordanian capital, taking the most direct route from Jakarta; there were no direct connections from Jakarta to Tel-Aviv. He had over-nighted in Amman where he had been informed that he could enter Israel at the Allenby Bridge frontier point.

  The taxi could go no further and Ennis was left at the drop off point, where he made his way by foot to the passport control, his passport was given a cursory glance and a slip of paper with the Jordanian stamp was inserted into it. He then climbed into a waiting bus that carried those entering Israel across the Jordan River to the Israeli baggage and passport control building, joining a motley crowd of mostly Arab passengers. He selected a window hoping to see the biblical Jordan, he was disappointed, it was nothing more than a miserable stream, barely visible between banks of scrubby vegetation, as it trickled under the iron bridge.

  They passed through the high barbed wire fences under the blue and white Israeli flags that fluttered in a stiff breeze. The passengers were carefully scrutinised by the guards, identifying their baggage that was loaded onto a conveyor and disappeared into the low barrack like building.

  They were led inside observed by Israeli security personnel, young women for the most part, Lenin would have been proud of the way they flaunted their arrogant equality. Ennis was given a quick once over and waited for his bags that had not yet emerged from the screened control area. A skinny blonde in jeans barely twenty years old treated an elderly Arab, leaning on a walking stick, in a condescending and loathful manner. Ennis could not help thinking of the scenes from Nazi Germany as he observed the blonde, forcing the old man to hoist his jellabah over his head and unbuckle his trouser belt as he raised weak protests, to no avail.

  Other young female guards in tight pants and white short-sleeved shirts, their tits thrust brazenly forward, looked on in haughty unabashed masculine poses, holding their impressive automatic weapons at ready on shoulder straps.

  The formalities completed he took a shinning new yellow taxi for Tel-Aviv. As the taxi climbed up from the Dead Sea they passed miserable Bedouin tents before which small wretched flocks of sheep grazed. They sped through Jerusalem and down the highway to Tel-Aviv; Ennis was convinced the driver was doing his best to fulfil a death wish.

  The suburbs leading to Tel-Aviv were not unlike those of any southern European city, the highway bordered by modern industry and office buildings and as they approached the inner suburban area they were caught in a vast snarl of traffic.

  The taxi delivered him to the Dan Hotel backing onto the Tel-Aviv sea front. It was not his first visit to Israel, a country that he had seen through the eyes of a tourist; history and beaches but also as a place of confrontation seen through press and TV news with reports of bombs, attacks and war.

  He was curious to discover the city and stepping out from the taxi was surprised by the exquisite mildness of the early December weather in the city, an extraordinary change from the biting cold of Europe or the steaming equatorial heat of Indonesia.

  He expected to find Pierre Ros waiting in the hotel for their meeting with Dr Wald, who according to Pierre had developed new technology that they could be used to corroborate material dating from the discovery site in Kalimantan. Wald, a nuclear scientist, was working on the development of new applications for radio isotope, including dating techniques in the field of archaeological research. He had convinced Pierre Ros that their ideas were far ahead of the field and had been successful in fixing new dates for Israel’s early human fossils.

  Almost as soon as he arrived in his room Pierre called to inform him that they were to be picked up by Wald for a meeting at his apartment. It seemed a little unusual to Ennis, they could have met in the hotel or at Wald’s offices. Wald was in his late forties, the first impression was that he was a kind but effusive person, between the hotel and his nearby suburb he talked non-stop, almost without taking a breath, he was informative and replied to the brief questions Ennis squeezed in with a deluge of information.

  The apartment was a large penthouse on the thirteenth floor of a modern a modern apartment building with a view over the Mediterranean in the middle distance. The entrance to the building was flanked with gardens filled with palms and other exotic plants. Ennis gathered from Wald that it was a smart residential area where politicians and celebrities lived.

  Like all Israelis Wald was immensely proud of his country’s achievements. His family were Sabras, his grand mother was born under the Ottomans, and the Walds considered themselves aristocrats of their country, constantly reminding the visitor of their nation’s scientific achievements and military prowess.

  Wald offered them cocktails and an Israeli buffet he described his work at the Soreq Centre near Beersheba about thirty kilometres from Tel-Aviv Shlomo where he worked in isotopic research. As the ate and drank he told Ennis that like most Israelis he was a Tshal reservist, holding the rank of colonel, in a communications, telling them in a matter of fact manner of his chaotic experiences in the six day war as a young officer and then in the 1973 war.

  Full of apologies Wald informed them that a Russian scientist from the Institute of Natural History in Moscow, Kutznetzov, would be joining them during their visit. It was unavoidable he explained, the Russian was scheduled to arrive the next day from Moscow, and to celebrate the arrival of his notable visitors he invited them all to a welcome dinner for the following evening.

  The next day Alxis Vyacheslav arrived on a Transaero flight, a Boeing, one of the many new Russian airlines that had sprung up, and one of the better companies. For Alxis Vyacheslav, like quite a few Russian, Israel was a home from home with about six hundred thousand Russian immigrants in the country, Jews who had seized the opportunity to leave Russia under Gorbatchev, mostly well educated Russians with industrial, scientific and academic skills. Tel Aviv had also become a centre of activity for the Russian Mafia as money could be freely moved in and out as could people, especially those of Jewish or claimed Jewish descent.

  It was a pleasant break from Moscow where the full force of the Russian winter had hit the city with heavy snow, ice and Artic temperatures. Tel Aviv it was another world away from the grim daily struggle for survival in Moscow, the mercury hovered between twenty and twenty six degrees with a very light breeze from the south west with clear blue skies.

  On Monday morning Wald picked them up from the hotel in his Volvo and drove them out to his offices near Beersheba where they were to meet his friends from the National Museum and then make a tour of the Soreq research and development facility. Wald had been twenty five minutes late, heavy traffic he explained, and it really was heavy. Tel Aviv was suffering from gridlock and pollution like all cities that had known a fast and almost uncontrolled development.

  The population of Tel-Aviv was growing and the country’s economy galloping ahead, peace was bringing its fruits, prosperity and with it the problems of modern society. In the conference room of Soreq centre an enlarged colour photograph of a blockhouse like building in the Negev Desert decorated one wall. Shlomo pointed to the photo and without the slightest attention to confidentiality described the layout and his role in that project.

  ‘We are the only significant company in the field in Israel and probably in the middle-east specialised in the development and application of radio isotopes.’

  He pointed to one area of the photo. ‘Here we are to build a new research unit.’

  They looked at the photo as his colleagues started arriving.

  ‘Well, everybody’s so let’s get down to our business.
’

  ‘Maybe you should tell John something about of the human fossils found in Israel,’ said Pierre.

  ‘Sure,’ said Shlomo, standing up and going to the marker board. ‘Israel is the home to some of the oldest archaeological sites known outside of East Africa; the site of Ubeidiya in the Jordan valley south west of the Sea of Galilee, is one of the oldest. However, palaeoanthropology really got going in Israel when one of Pierre’s compatriots, a French anthropologist, Bernard Vandermeersch, Professor of Anthropology from the University of Bordeaux, discovered a series of Middle Palaeolithic burial sites full of distinctly modern humans in the sixties and seventies at a place called Qafez in Lower Galilee.

  ‘It was quite sensational discovery and Moshe Dayan even provided a helicopter to transport the fossils of a modern woman and child encased in a limestone block.

  ‘About fifteen years later just a few kilometres from Qafez in a cave called Kebara; a fossilised man was found and identified as a Neanderthal. Then in eighty-three we discovered the most complete Neanderthal skeleton ever found, with its spinal column, rib cage, and pelvis.’

  ‘They called it Moshe,’ laughed Pierre.

  ‘A short distance from Kebara along the coast road is the Tabun cave which has deposits twenty-five metres deep spanning more than 100,000 years of Neanderthal occupation. Then not far away is another cave, called Skhul, it’s an older site, what I mean by that is that it was discovered in the 1930s, there they found some modern-looking humans.’

  ‘Quite a mixture,’ commented Ennis.

  ‘Absolutely, Neanderthals and modern humans, and what’s interesting is that the tools found with the bones are all very much similar. Suggesting that the fossils found in Qafez could be “proto-Cro-Magnons”, that is to say almost modern man.’

  ‘What about the dates, have you been able to investigate these?’

  ‘That’s why we’re here John.’ Pierre Ros said with a broad smile. ‘Explain Shlomo!’

  ‘We needed a new way of measuring time, if possible an absolute dating technique so they could determine the age of the Mount Carmel fossils with precision.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you that the most well known method is radiocarbon dating, but it only works for material up to around fifty or sixty thousand years old. After that the amount of radioactive carbon left is so small that it becomes in practical terms useless. Then there is radioactive potassium technique used to date volcanic deposits older than half a million years, this was used for dating Lucy.’

  ‘So there was a gap between these two techniques?’

  ‘Right, so the fossils we found here in Israel fell into a black hole as far as exact dating was concerned.’

  ‘That’s where we came in,’ said Pierre proudly. ‘One of our scientists, Hélène Valladas, used what was then a new technique, thermoluminescence, to date stone tools Kebara and Qafzeh.

  ‘This works on the principal that minerals give off a burst of light when heated to about 500 degrees centigrade, so when a tool was heated enough by fire, it gave up its thermoluminescent energy.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘No doubt some of the cave dwellers stone tools got accidentally kicked into their fires and were buried in the ashes of the hearth where they remained until we rediscovered them, so with these stone tools we could determine with precision the moment when they were kicked into the fire.’

  ‘Where does this thermoluminecent energy come from?’ asked Ennis.

  ‘Ah, that’s a complicated question, but it’s a bit like this, thermoluminecense, or the light emitted, is due to the recombination of electrical charges trapped at defect sites within the mineral’s lattices, and the quantity is proportional to energy absorbed by the mineral as a result of previous exposure to ionizing radiation.’

  ‘In simple terms John, naturally occurring radiation, or radioactivity if you like,’ interjected Pierre.

  ‘Actually we use it in the antique business for dating ceramics and stone statues, but I’ve never really given much thought to how it works,’

  ‘Well as I said it sounds a little bit complicated,’ Shlomo said laughing at Ennis. ‘But in reality it’s quite simple. Normally, those electrical charges trapped in the mineral’s lattices will remain there indefinitely that is if the mineral remains at normal ambient temperatures. But if the mineral is heated up to 500°C, the electrons trapped inside are ejected, as photons, or light, in the visible spectrum.

  ‘So when a stone tool is heated above that temperature it’s like re-setting a clock. Over time the energy in the stone slowly builds up again, so the greater the quantity of light emitted from a stone tool when we heat it up again in our laboratory, the greater the time passed since it was kicked into the fire and its clock reset.

  ‘This means that we can use this method for fixing dates with an accuracy of as great as seven percent for stone tools up to about half a million years old, ten times more than with carbon-14.

  ‘So if we get back to our Neanderthals and moderns. Valladas fixed the age of our Neanderthal, Moshe, at Kebara at around sixty-thousand years from the stone tools found next to him.

  ‘That was great until Valladas then set the cat among the pigeons as you say, by announcing the so-called ‘modern’ skeletons at Qafzeh were 92,000 years old. In other words Moshe was 32,000 years younger than the Qafzeh woman and child.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘Easy, if modern humans inhabited the Levant 40,000 years before the Neanderthals, they could hardly hand in addition but they used the same tool kits demonstrating that as far as their technology was concerned they were at the same level of development.’