by Patrick Hunt
If the destruction of Thera around 1620 BC is in any way applicable here, it might provide the when and possibly the why about how these ancient cultures began to change so radically. This is especially true in the Aegean world, because it dovetails nicely with these dual Egyptian and Mediterranean/Minoan histories as we understand them. Furthermore, rather than contradict, it better explains the noticed change in material cultures. At this time nobody else—especially the Egyptians—ventured out into the open seas or had the knowledge to do so. So when the tidal wave from Thera’s destruction crushed many of their ships, along with their navigating mariners in their island harbors, the Minoans of Crete and Akrotiri obviously lost a considerable portion of their maritime advantage. If this hypothesis is right, the Aegean islands also lost their monopolies on certain materials, and the major trade routes commanded by Minoans between Egypt, Palestine and the Aegean were affected for generations. Although connecting the chronology is hugely problematic, the historian J. G. Bennett has even tried to associate Thera’s destruction and the darkness brought by its spreading volcanic ash over the eastern Mediterranean with the biblical plagues of Egypt described in the book of Exodus. N. Platon, the great Greek archaeologist working on Crete, also wondered a few decades ago whether certain Egyptian texts, such as this one, refer to the influence of Thera:The sun is covered and does not shine to the sight of men. Life is no longer possible when the sun is concealed behind the clouds. Ra has turned his face from mankind.
In stable Egypt along the usually predictable Nile to the deep south, thick airborne ash from Thera’s eruption could have greatly diminished the sunlight so needed for life and agriculture, and this could have been temporarily catastrophic as well. It may yet happen that archaeologists and historians will all agree that the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, successors to the island culture Minoans, eventually picked up the pieces of the Aegean trade and ruled the fragments of the Minoan world when they carefully ventured out again into the sea. These trading peoples would have been followed by the Phoenicians, who became the next wave of great mariners of the ancient world, not intimidated by open water and eager to ply their commerce beyond the shining water of the horizon.
Conclusion
Plato may have been only trying to cobble different versions of old myths together, and Atlantis may not ever be proven to be Thera, but such a connection is certainly worthy of continuing research scholarship. Gauged by Akrotiri alone, the wealth of the island of Thera is not as surprising as was once thought, especially if it was such an important Minoan entrepôt before the volcanic eruption “sank” the island. Connecting its multistoried town, its lovely frescoes and the likely trade in emery from other islands under its hegemony, Akrotiri and Thera make more sense now than ever before.
After years of waiting to prove his ideas while looking closely at the land around him, Marinatos’s first exciting field day in 1967 proved the discovery of Akrotiri was no accident. When Marinatos first dug at Akrotiri, standing in the fine ash blown by the wind across the island in the middle of the blue sea, he must have wondered how he would be remembered. But Marinatos was a patient man. Thinking about the long, slow years that had passed between his ideas being ridiculed in 1939 when he was laughed at, and this day in 1967 when the beautiful clay vessels began to emerge from the volcanic ash under his feet, Marinatos had the last laugh. After all, he could have smiled to himself, Akrotiri had waited millennia under the ash, so why shouldn’t he have waited a few decades to answer his own question?
Chapter 9
Olduvai Gorge
The Key to Human Evolution
Olduvai Gorge, East Africa, 1959
Louis and Mary Leakey had been eking out an austere existence in East Africa for decades without much attention or success, living almost hand-to-mouth on small grants while they looked painstakingly for the earliest human ancestors. If they hadn’t been so dedicated, they would have given up years before.
But everything changed on July 17, 1959. Mary Leakey was working solo because Louis was sick. She was accompanied on a promising new survey walk by a local cameraman, Des Bartlett, who produced British safari films but had expressed interest in filming an excavation just for the novelty. They were walking at Olduvai near the junction of two gorges, a depression bed called a korongo in the local African dialect, rich in bones and stone artifacts. On foot Mary and Des explored an unexcavated site the Leakeys had named FLK. Recent rains had washed soil and dust away, freshly exposing embedded objects and removing surface dust and soil. Archaeologists like Mary Leakey learn fast from experience how rains can make artifacts stand out sharply on the surface, including here on the mixed basalt-limestone of FLK. Sharp-eyed Mary was looking at the ground as she walked along the edge of the eroded korongo bed when something caught her attention. This was a thick mastoid skull fragment sticking up like new from the old soil surface that had almost certainly just been cleaned by the rain. Mary immediately noticed the teeth were hominid and not those of another primate, and that a lot of the skull was apparently embedded there. It was the find of her career.
Mary ran back breathlessly to Louis in camp, who jumped out of his bed despite being ill, and they rushed together to FLK and began carefully excavating the hominid skull, all the while being captured in film segments on the spot by Des Bartlett. Thus, the exact process of finding and excavating this discovery was memorialized in film. Although Louis was a bit disappointed, probably because he was hoping for a later homo artifact and possibly because Mary found it instead of him, he promptly named its genus as Zinjanthropus after an Arabic word (zinj) for “East Africa” combined with “man” (anthropus). The species name was given in honor of Charles Boise, one of the Leakeys’ few sponsors. Soon after, when shown to a curious and receptive crowd at the African archaeology section of the Pan-African Congress, Zinjanthropus boisei also came to light as a television and media star. No one could dispute the validity of their excavation—caught on film from its very moment of discovery—and news of Zinjanthropus was soon published in the preeminent international science journal Nature as a major australopithecine discovery.
The film media—sensing a new role after having captured this discovery—soon realized themselves how important documentary films could be. They had tremendous appeal to a science-hungry world, which could now witness discoveries up close by film. Louis Leakey, knowing a lucky circumstance had changed their lives, wisely capitalized on this media prospect more than anyone else at the time. The area where the skull was found was later proved by a new potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating method to go back 1.7 million years, and this one fossil paleontology find brought the Leakeys science celebrity status and much-needed funding from the National Geographic Society. This vaulted the Leakey name into the academic limelight and guaranteed their continuing work, including Louis’s later Homo habilis find. But as Brian Fagan acknowledges in his Oxford Companion to Archaeology (1996), “The discovery of Zinjanthropus boisei was a turning point in the study of human origins.”
Out of Africa
“Out of Africa” is not just a theoretical phrase about something so distant it doesn’t matter, nor is it a romantic notion embedded in a movie title. If you ask the average person on the street what the phrase “out of Africa” means, you might hear a range of answers, some incorrect, but many people will know it refers to human origins. Here are a few reasons why the discovery of human ancestors in and around Olduvai Gorge lying in the Great Rift of Africa changed history permanently.
Important questions about human origins were answered at Olduvai, and continuing research has only confirmed this. Due to geology and plate tectonics, the African Great Rift Zone is an ideal place for sleuthing human origins. Growing up nearby, Louis Leakey and later his family were well suited as pioneers to search for human ancestors in Africa; in fact, the Leakeys are often referred to as the “First Family of Human Origins.” As seen above, the Leakeys’ discovery of Zinjanthropus (now called Paranthropus boisei) in 1959 e
lectrified the world and turned global attention to Africa. Following the Leakeys, in 1974 Donald Johanson found “Lucy,” and proved she belonged to the australopithecine branch of the early “human” family.
This complex story cannot be easily told from its earliest stages, but we can pick it up as it was articulated and became a quest over the last few centuries, finally coming to fruition in the early and mid twentieth century. The story of the fairly recent discovery of human origins is as exciting as any other discovery in our history.
A deep gorge splits East Africa, hundreds of feet deep in some places, mostly shallower in others. One section of it is named Olduvai. You can see across the gorge where the rocks have been gradually pulled apart by geological forces over millions of years, a tumble of loose talus marking its old eroded edges. This divergent continental plate boundary divides the tectonic units of Africa in an invisibly slow process of separation. Perhaps a few million years ago the split was not as wide, and at that time our earliest tool-making ancestors lived, hunted or searched for sources of the perfect stone along the gorge for hundreds of miles. Sometimes they were not the hunters but the hunted, caught and torn piecemeal by ravenous saber-toothed tigers and other huge beasts that were probably far more fierce than the big cat and hyena descendants now living in the natural parks and preserves of Africa. When these hominid ancestors’ bones were buried or scattered in this rift valley, time reabsorbed some of the bones and either fossilized them or embedded them in more recent limestone rock, like cement made up from old lake bed sediments, powdery stuff that water soon turned into a natural concrete.
Because Olduvai Gorge, like East Africa around it, was also a volcanic region, later lava flows even poured across the same fissured surfaces, often covering the fossilized bones under deepening layers. Some of these bones had already turned into silica copies of their original shapes. If we can imagine what these primeval hunters looked like, it may be difficult to picture them as recognizably human. They usually had longer arms with denser bones and their hip and knee joints were not as fully adapted to being upright, although their speed in flight must have still been phenomenally fast. If not fully covered with hair, nature nonetheless offered them more protection than modern humans have. Some aspects would have already begun to separate them from other primates; their crania were shaped very differently from chimpanzees’ and gorillas’, with much larger forebrains protected by less prominent brows. But it was the eyes in their erect heads that would have glinted with more than a glimmer of intelligence: they knew they had to survive against formidable and far stronger enemies. This incentive for adaptation to their circumstances brought out capacities for finding better weapons and tools beyond their own hands. They knew from growing experience that a stone in their hands was stronger and more durable than their own flesh, a tougher extension of themselves. Such stones held in their hands offered the power to withstand their natural enemies and enabled them to utilize the resources around them: their hands could not break wood or rock, but a strong stone in their hands, even slightly broken and altered to a sharper edge, would cut wood and other harder substances with which their world was filled, making life a little less harsh. They feared and respected fire, like the wild animals around them, but at some point they began to see fire as an ally, standing near where the savannahs burned from lightning strikes, inching ever closer in curiosity through the millennia to that magical moment when they could capture fire and use it without being burned. Somewhere along this gradual, slow continuum, these primates became what we would agree was truly human.
Why questions about human origins are important
Some people would subvert the question of human origins into a religious debate, often out of fear of complexity or the unknown. Having to really seek new answers instead of swallow old dogma can be harder for certain minds to accept. But understanding who we are and how we developed or evolved is part of our deeper human experience. In reality, we are probably not fully human if we do not reflect on this question, because to be fully human means to constantly and intelligently search for answers to difficult questions. This complex question is confounding because its possible answers derive from the oldest possible time imaginable, an inquiry so much earlier than most others we could ask, especially since we have no legible history of events so long ago.
Alternate views of the cosmos and our place in it have always been around, despite what religion says. From the dawn of time not everyone has been so easily persuaded that the shamans, priests and oracles knew all the answers they claimed. The scientific revolutions of the Renaissance and the following Enlightenment showed it was not only acceptable but necessary to seek more information about human history and prehistory.
Copernican proof in the sixteenth century—probably laid out by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC and later suppressed or forgotten—transformed perceptions about the earth’s true place in the solar system and brought a new humility to astronomy, which some found frightening. Geology and other sciences followed with radical interpretations about history, among them the ideas that the universe and earth were far older than the supposed moment of creation in 4004 BC. But the most radical idea of time past to come from the beginnings of modern science was that the human species wasn’t created but in fact evolved and could possibly even be shown in transitional stages. Adam and Eve were no longer a single pair of individuals but a generic set of the first genetic parents who might not easily resemble us, their latest offspring.
Charles Darwin, who had considered a career in theology after Cambridge, hypothesized around 1871 in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex that Africa might be the source of the human family. As Ann Gibbons tells it now (2006):Darwin chose Africa because humans’ closest cousins in the animal kingdom—chimpanzees and gorillas—lived in Africa; therefore, he wrote, “it is more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” But Darwin admitted that it was “useless to speculate on this subject,” since an extinct European ape nearly as large as humans could also have given rise to humans.
The Darwinian idea of descent from related primates has had enough well-known and widely published impact on conservative thinking to not need any amplification here, but what made Olduvai so incredibly important is that it brought much-needed evidence to the search for the missing links in primate evolution.
A Dutch doctor and anatomist, Eugene Dubois (1858-1940), looked for missing links in Asia and found the incomplete bone remains of what is popularly called Java Man in 1891 in Indonesia. He named his find Pithecanthropus erectus but it now belongs to the category of Homo erectus. Dubois was vilified from many directions and is still attacked by antievolutionists claiming he faked and then later recanted his evidence, which is both terribly unfair and untrue. This is the price he paid for being the first to substantiate Darwin with early human finds.
But before Louis Leakey (1903-72), only Raymond Dart and a few others made Africa the focus of early human research, as paleontologists of the time would rarely venture to Africa to look for the kind of evidence needed. Raymond Dart (1893-1988) was the noted physical anthropologist and anatomist who had already found australopithecine skeletal remains in South Africa in 1924, in the famous fossilized Taung baby skull embedded in limestone. Dart’s controversial claim to finding this new fossil human ancestor, which he named Australopithecus africanus (“Southern African ape-man”) was not well received by the global scientific community, let alone Darwin’s detractors in the religious world. Dart’s startling find was variously called a fluke, an anomalous accident or just a misinterpretation of the fossil remains. His paleontologist colleague from Scotland, Robert Broom, was one of the few who stood against the tide of criticism and joined Dart in South Africa, finding more fragmentary fossil australopithecine remains, although they worked in relative obscurity for decades. Knowledgeable in dentistry, Dart had pointed out the difference in teeth between other primates and early hominids: e
arly hominids lacked the frightening fangs of their primate cousins, with smaller incisors and molars for grinding. Part of this was dietary and part was adaptation to dependence on stone tools that would do the work of fangs, just as Darwin had theorized. Thus, both lower jaws and mastoidal skull fragments with reliable dentation were believed by Dart and Broom to be tremendously important. But more evidence was needed to flesh out Darwin’s theories, and while Africa was believed by many evolutionary pioneers to be the place, the locations and details of human origins were only just beginning to be connected from general theory to specific credible paleontological fieldwork.
The African Great Rift Zone is an ideal place for sleuthing
Darwin made one of the first stabs in the near dark about related geological masses across continents. Plate tectonics is a given in today’s accepted canon of earth science, but Darwin’s query was almost a century before continental drift and plate tectonics were formally postulated. Darwin’s observations in South Africa and South America foreshadowed Louis Leakey’s later hunch about human origins in Africa by at least a half century.
As mentioned, the geology of the Great Rift, like nearly any plate tectonic boundary, was active and divergent, caused by the spreading of the continents of Asia and Africa away from each other. Almost always accompanied by volcanism on one or both sides, like the “Ring of Fire” on the Pacific Ocean’s plate margins, such rift zones penetrate deep into the earth’s thin crust. East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge is such a place, a remnant of long geological change over scores of millions of years. This rift is marked by several phenomena, one of which is that a plate boundary slowly breaks up and gradually exposes on its edges the much deeper buried sediments and layers that would not otherwise be so visible, except in such active rift zones. Thus, fossils can turn up at a much higher density in a rift zone such as Olduvai Gorge. Another phenomenon is possibly more important for early human ancestry: the geology at a rift zone frequently includes obsidian, and all hominids and later humans would seek out toolmaking stone like obsidian or basalt because of related volcanic activity. Obsidian is the stone of choice for cutting, for weapons and for many other tool needs because, as volcanic glass, it fractures conchoidally very much like man-made glass, being nearly the sharpest cutting material in nature. Wherever obsidian can be found, it is always a high-value commodity. Abundance of obsidian is likely one of the things attracting early hominids to this location, as well as the fact that water also collected here in low points across the gorge’s terrain, drawing the animals that were hunted for food and the food chain’s predatory beasts as well.