A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [235]
Jillani Ngalli, a keen young man from the Kenyan National Museum who had been dispatched to act as guide, told me that the quartz and obsidian rocks from which the axes were made were never found on the valley floor. “They had to carry the stones from there,” he said, nodding at a pair of mountains in the hazy middle distance, in opposite directions from the site: Olorgesailie and Ol Esakut. Each was about ten kilometers, or six miles, away—a long way to carry an armload of stone.
Why the early Olorgesailie people went to such trouble we can only guess, of course. Not only did they lug hefty stones considerable distances to the lakeside, but, perhaps even more remarkably, they then organized the site. The Leakeys' excavations revealed that there were areas where axes were fashioned and others where blunt axes were brought to be resharpened. Olorgesailie was, in short, a kind of factory; one that stayed in business for a million years.
Various replications have shown that the axes were tricky and labor-intensive objects to make—even with practice, an axe would take hours to fashion—and yet, curiously, they were not particularly good for cutting or chopping or scraping or any of the other tasks to which they were presumably put. So we are left with the position that for a million years—far, far longer than our own species has even been in existence, much less engaged in continuous cooperative efforts—early people came in considerable numbers to this particular site to make extravagantly large numbers of tools that appear to have been rather curiously pointless.
And who were these people? We have no idea actually. We assume they were Homo erectus because there are no other known candidates, which means that at their peak—their peak—the Olorgesailie workers would have had the brains of a modern infant. But there is no physical evidence on which to base a conclusion. Despite over sixty years of searching, no human bone has ever been found in or around the vicinity of Olorgesailie. However much time they spent there shaping rocks, it appears they went elsewhere to die.
“It's all a mystery,” Jillani Ngalli told me, beaming happily.
The Olorgesailie people disappeared from the scene about 200,000 years ago when the lake dried up and the Rift Valley started to become the hot and challenging place it is today. But by this time their days as a species were already numbered. The world was about to get its first real master race, Homo sapiens. Things would never be the same again.
30 GOOD-BYE
IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton's Principia, Henry Cavendish's weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.
There, some forgotten sailor or sailor's pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings.
We don't know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so