Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [22]
Exhilarated by the find, Leakey went on to inspect the site in Bed II, where Reck had discovered Oldoway Man. By good fortune, four wooden pegs that Reck had used to mark the site were still in place. Reck recounted how he had found the skeleton, insisting that it was not merely a recent burial, as Leakey and others had argued, but was as old as Bed II itself. Leakey was soon persuaded that Reck was right. In high spirits, Leakey, Reck and Arthur Hopwood, a British Museum palaeontologist, sat down to compile a report to Nature supporting Reck’s original conclusion about the age of the skeleton. One week after arriving at Olduvai, Leakey was on his way back to Nairobi, convinced that his expedition had solved the mystery of Oldoway Man. In a short article he wrote for the London Times, before returning to Olduvai, he claimed that it was ‘almost beyond question’ that Oldoway Man was ‘the oldest known authentic skeleton of Homo sapiens’.
For two months, the run of discoveries continued. Leakey described Olduvai as ‘a veritable paradise for the prehistorian as well as for the palaeontologist’. His team recovered hand-axes from all five beds in the gorge, providing him with ‘a complete sequence of evolutionary stages of the hand-axe culture’. In the oldest bed—Bed I—they found ‘pebble tools’, simple flakes struck off pebbles, which came from the earliest known culture in the world, named by Leakey as the Oldowan.
But the harsh conditions at Olduvai were a constant problem. Water was in short supply and had to be rationed. A strong wind blew incessantly, carrying with it swirls of fine black dust. Leakey wrote:
If you spread some semi-liquid sun-melted butter on a piece of bread it would be covered with fine black dust before you could get it to your mouth. If you poured out a cup of tea or coffee in a few minutes it had a fine black scum of dust on its surface. You breathed dust-laden air, your nostrils were filled with dust, you ate dust, drank dust, slept in dust-ridden bedding, and in fact everything was dust, dust, dust! The heat of the sun was terrific; and if you had a tendency to perspire at all you did so very freely, and the dust mingled with the sweat to make your body filthy. And yet water was so scarce ...
The team also had to contend with marauding lions, rhinoceroses and hyenas that frequented the gorge. By the end of two months they were ‘really rather glad at the prospect of a change’.
After sorting out his collection in Nairobi, Leakey set out on another expedition, this time to fossil sites at Kanjera in western Kenya, eight miles from Lake Victoria. The conditions were different, but just as arduous. The area was frequently drenched by heavy downpours. ‘Whereas the constant trouble at Oldoway had been “not enough water”’, wrote Leakey, ‘here our trouble was too much of it’. Hordes of mosquitoes swarmed around the camp site at night.
Sometimes they were so bad after dark that it was really difficult to feed ourselves at supper time. We used to wear long trousers tucked into Wellington boots to protect our legs, and tie towels round our heads leaving only the mouth, nose and eyes exposed, but even so we were terribly bitten, and on one occasion one of us killed over a hundred mosquitoes on his face during one meal.
Within a matter of weeks, Leakey and his team made two significant discoveries: fragments of two skulls from Kanjera and part of a jaw from a site at Kanam, three miles away. The Kanam mandible