Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [34]
Leakey was unrepentant. Addressing a gathering in Washington, DC, he declared:
To me the most significant step that ever was taken in human history, the thing that turns animal into man was this step of making tools to a set and regular pattern. This is why we chose that definition of Homo ... Once he had made the simplest of tools, he immediately opened himself a completely new food supply—and enhanced his chances of competing with other creatures.
And in a later press release, he urged colleagues ‘to review all their previous ideas about human origins and to substitute for those theories new ones which were more in keeping with the facts that are now known’.
Although reaching his sixties and suffering from arthritic pains in his hip joints and other ailments, Louis Leakey kept up a frenetic pace of activity. As well as establishing a Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology in Nairobi, he took an increasing interest in primate research. He fostered the careers of three young primatologists—or ‘ape ladies’, as they were sometimes called—who went on to achieve worldwide fame: Jane Goodall, whom he despatched to study chimpanzees in the forests bordering Lake Tanganyika; Dian Fossey, whom he sent to the Virunga Mountains to study highland gorillas; and Birute Galdikas, whom he helped to study orang-utans in Indonesia. He was also instrumental in opening a new chapter in African exploration.
At a luncheon given by Kenya’s leader, Jomo Kenyatta, at State House in Nairobi in 1965, Leakey met Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, who asked him why fossils had been found in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya but not in Ethiopia. ‘Well, Your Royal Highness’, replied Leakey, ‘if you would allow us to go and search in your country, I know where we might find something’. Haile Selassie wanted to know why he had not already been there to look. ‘Well’, replied Leakey, ‘it’s always been difficult. Your government has not given us the facilities’. ‘All right’, said Haile Selassie, ‘I’ll arrange it’.
CHAPTER 7
KOOBI FORA
RISING IN THE Ethiopian highlands, the Omo River runs southwards for 700 miles towards the Kenya border before flowing into a landlocked desert lake known as the Jade Sea. A French aristocrat, Robert Bourg de Bozas, discovered fossiliferous deposits in the lower Omo Valley in 1902, but it was not until 1932 that an expedition led by the French palaeontologist Camille Arambourg went to investigate the area. Arambourg’s team took several tons of vertebrate fossils back to Paris but found no evidence of hominids. In 1959, a thirty-four-year-old American palaeoanthropologist, Clark Howell, spent several weeks searching the Omo deposits, but the fossils he found were confiscated by Ethiopian border guards on his departure and the Ethiopian authorities subsequently refused him permission to return to the Omo.
It was to this remote, arid stretch of southern Ethiopia—the homeland of nomadic, warring tribes—that Haile Selassie now agreed that Leakey should mount an international expedition. A local wildlife warden warned: ‘This bit of Africa has never been governed or administered by anyone at all and primitive reactions prevail’. Leakey was given nominal charge of the venture, but the pain he suffered from arthritic hips prevented him from participating in any fieldwork and he planned only to make occasional visits. Instead, Leakey arranged for Arambourg, then aged eighty-two, to lead a French team; and for Clark Howell to lead an American team. At Howell’s insistence, the teams included geologists, anatomists, archaeologists and other specialists skilled in examining the fossils of plants and animals as well as hominids. Howell’s aim was to turn the field itself into a laboratory that would help reveal the wider world in which hominids lived. His multidisciplinary approach—in marked contrast to the popular image of the lone field scientist that Leakey cultivated—set a new standard for palaeoanthropological research.
Added to this array of talent was a team from Kenya with less expertise. Because