Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [42]
The team also included a young American palaeoanthropologist, Donald Johanson. One year older than Richard Leakey, he possessed the same ruthless ambition and was to emerge as Leakey’s chief rival. The only child of Swedish immigrants, born in Chicago in 1943, his interest in anthropology had first been kindled by reading Louis Leakey’s account in National Geographic about Mary Leakey’s discovery of Zinj at Olduvai in 1959. Louis, he recalled, was ‘proof that a man could make a career out of digging up fossils’. As an undergraduate, he had attended a seminar that Louis had given at the University of Illinois and had fallen under his spell, as many others had done. ‘Louis not only made the subject of paleoanthropology interesting’, Johanson recalled, ‘he made it come alive through his infectious imagination’.
As a graduate student, Johanson had spent three seasons with Clark Howell at Omo, where he gained a reputation for holding abrasive views about the French scientists working there. In his own account of the Omo project, he referred to the ‘difficulties’ of collaborating with the French. ‘There was scarcely anything that the French did in the same way as the Americans’, he wrote. ‘Their attitude to work was less urgent’. According to an account of the Hadar expedition by Jon Kalb, Johanson was ‘an unending source of divisiveness and tension in camp’, frequently complaining about the work of Taieb and Coppens and indulging in malicious gossip. ‘Johanson’s opinions and complaints about people were oddly bitter and came in spurts, as though he were periodically seized with vitriol or some dire affliction’. He was obsessed, said Kalb, with finding hominids. ‘He wanted to monopolise the expedition, to make the search for hominids its only purpose. He’d get upset if other work took precedence over his’.
Whatever his personal foibles, it was Johanson, half-way through the two-month expedition in 1973, who found the first hominid fossils. Exploring a gully near the base of the Hadar section, he idly kicked what looked like a hippo rib sticking out of the sand. It came loose, and he realised that it was probably the upper end of the shinbone of a small primate. As he was recording the spot in his notebook, he noticed another bone a few yards away—the lower end of a thighbone; next to it lay part of a knee joint. All three pieces fitted together perfectly, making a slight angle at the knee joint. At first Johanson thought the bones belonged to a monkey, but then he recalled that a monkey’s thighbone and shinbone joined in a straight line. ‘Almost against my will’, he wrote, ‘I began to picture in my mind the skeleton of a human being, and recall the outward slant from knee to thigh that was peculiar to upright walkers. I tried to refit the bones together to bring them into line. They would not go. It dawned on me that this was a hominid fossil’.
Desperate to confirm the hominid find, Johanson resorted to unorthodox methods. In his application for funds from the National Science Foundation to enable him to join the Afar expedition, he had hinted strongly at the possibility of finding hominid fossils, and yet, after a month in the field, with his money running out, he had so far nothing to show. ‘What does a young man do on his first expedition, when he is given a two-year grant and has exhausted most of it the first year and has not found what he went out to look for?’ he wrote. ‘He wonders what he will do the second year. He wonders if he may not crash, if he may not get a reputation for irresponsibility before his career gets properly started. He sweats’.
The day after his discovery, Johanson set out from camp, accompanied by an American graduate student, heading for a nearby Afar burial mound. Reaching inside the mound, he retrieved a thighbone and took it back to camp to compare with the fossil. Other