Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [44]
But whether Lucy belonged to the genus Homo or should be classified as an australopithecine remained uncertain. Introducing Lucy to the world’s media at a press conference in Addis Ababa at the end of the 1974 season, Johanson was uncharacteristically circumspect: Lucy, he said, was either ‘a small Homo or a small australopithecine’.
The discovery of Lucy propelled Johanson to worldwide fame. ‘I was no longer an unknown anthropology graduate’, he wrote in his autobiographical account, Lucy, ‘but a promising young field worker with fossils dazzling enough to match those of paleoanthropology’s certified supernova, Richard Leakey’.
But Johanson wanted more than to match Leakey; he was determined to surpass him and establish himself as pre-eminent in the field. So often did Johanson talk of his ambition that several of his colleagues thought he had become obsessed by the idea. Jon Kalb recalled that when gossiping about the Leakeys, Johanson had often been scathing about Richard Leakey’s lack of academic credentials. The two fossil-hunters had nevertheless developed what appeared to be a firm friendship. After meeting Johanson at a conference in Nairobi in 1973, Leakey had gone out of his way to encourage him, making introductions, taking him into the field, offering advice. Both Richard and Mary Leakey had furnished letters commending Johanson’s work in Hadar. The Leakey Foundation had come to his rescue with a $10,000 grant to enable him to get through the 1974 season there. But after finding Lucy, Johanson’s ambition soared further. Maurice Taieb found his own leadership under challenge. ‘He wants everything for himself’, Taieb recalled, ‘and it was all because he wanted to pass Richard’.
Johanson’s run of luck continued to hold. When Johanson, Taieb and other members of the Afar Expedition reassembled in Hadar in 1975, accompanied by a camera crew, it took them only two weeks to make another remarkable discovery. A hillside known as site 333 yielded more than 200 pieces of bones and teeth, representing at least thirteen individuals—men, women and children—who were at first thought to have died together about 3 million years ago. They came to be known as the First Family—the earliest group of associated individuals ever found. (Subsequent research, however, indicated the bones may have been deposited in separate events, suggesting a more gradual accumulation.)
In an article for National Geographic, Johanson assigned them unequivocally to the genus Homo. He was ecstatic not just because the find was unprecedented, but because he had managed to trump the Leakeys. ‘I’ve got you now, Richard!’ he was recorded on camera as saying. ‘I’ve got you now’.
But meanwhile, further Leakey finds were also receiving acclaim.
CHAPTER 9
LAETOLI
IN 1974, after completing a further six years of fieldwork at Olduvai, Mary Leakey decided to investigate a site called Laetoli some thirty miles from her camp. Named by the Maasai after a red lily which grows in profusion there, the Laetoli site had once consisted of flat savannah grassland, but numerous eruptions from a nearby volcano, Sadiman, twenty miles to the east, had built up layers of volcanic ash more than 400 feet thick.
Mary had visited Laetoli on three previous occasions, the first time with Louis Leakey in 1935, a second time in 1959, and more recently on a day’s excursion in 1969. Exploring the area in 1974, Mary’s team of fossil-hunters were soon rewarded; over a period of twelve days, they turned up fossils of thirteen hominids. Samples of lava from Laetoli were sent to Garniss Curtis in California for dating analysis. The results were spectacular. They showed that Laetoli’s hominids ranged in age from 3.35 to 3.75 million years, making them the oldest hominid fossils ever found. One of the specimens—part of a lower jaw numbered LH-4—was destined to become the subject of an extraordinary furore four years later.
The fossils seemed to