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The punctuated-equilibrium theory sparked an intense debate that lasted for decades. What everyone agreed, however, was that human evolution was a far more complex business than had once been thought.

CHAPTER 11

TURKANA BOY

WHILE WORKING at Koobi Fora, Richard Leakey often gazed across the jade-green waters of Lake Turkana, wondering what secrets lay on its western shore. In 1980, he despatched Kamoya Kimeu and the Hominid Gang to begin a series of preliminary explorations there.

Since joining the Leakeys at Olduvai in 1960 as an apprentice fossil-hunter at the age of twenty, Kimeu had led the Hominid Gang on a series of expeditions, scouring sites at the Omo River Valley, Koobi Fora and Laetoli. His skill as a fossil-hunter had become legendary. His team had found more primate and hominid fossils than any other group of professional palaeoanthropologists anywhere. Upon seeing Lucy for the first time, Kimeu told Don Johanson: ‘If you found that, think what I could find’.

The key to Kimeu’s success, according to the British anatomist Alan Walker, a friend and colleague, was his perseverance. ‘He walks the same territory over and over again, changing courses around obstacles, and he tells his people to do the same’, Walker wrote in The Wisdom of the Bones. ‘If you walked to the left around this bush yesterday, then walk to the right today. If you walked into the sun yesterday, then walk with the sun at your back today. And most of all, walk, and walk, and walk, and look while you are doing it. Don’t daydream; don’t scan the horizon for shade; ignore the burning sun even when the temperature reaches 135 degrees F. Keep your eyes on the ground searching for that elusive sliver of bone or gleaming tooth’.

Kimeu also possessed a hawklike talent for spotting shapes on the ground that others would miss. And it was his expertise that would lead to yet another spectacular discovery.

After setting up camp in August 1984 in a grove of acacia trees on the banks of a sand river called Nariokotome, three miles inland from the lake, Kimeu’s team spent two weeks exploring the area, finding an array of animal bones but no hominid fossils. Frustrated by the lack of results, Kimeu decided to move to another area after a day of rest. While other members of the team spent the day relaxing, Kimeu set off once more, choosing to look at a small hill on the opposite bank of the dry river bed, some 300 yards from camp.

To the untrained eye, it seemed an ordinary place: a scattering of black lava pebbles on the slope; a goat track snaking past a ragged thorn tree; a large salvadora tree where local Turkana children would gather to eat its pungent sweet-sour berries. But among the pebbles and dried leaves and sticks on the ground, Kimeu spotted a fragment of bone; it was no bigger than two postage stamps, one inch by two inches. Picking it up, he recognised it as belonging to the cranial vault of a hominid—the bony covering of the brain.

In the days that followed, as excavations got underway, more and more bones were discovered: parts of the skull, shoulder blades, ribs and pelvis. After four weeks of digging and sieving, Richard Leakey’s Turkana team managed to retrieve enough body parts to assemble a skeleton. What was more, it was a skeleton of Homo erectus—the first one that anyone had ever seen.

It had been nearly 100 years since the Dutch physician Eugène Dubois had come across the first evidence of Homo erectus (Pithecanthropus) in Java. Subsequent discoveries in Asia of Homo erectus bones during the 1920s and 1930s had lent weight to the notion that the origins of humankind were to be found there rather than in Africa. Estimates of the date for these Asian fossils ranged from 700,000 to 500,000 years. During the 1960s, fragments of Homo erectus had been uncovered from a variety of sites at Olduvai, with dates ranging from 1 million to 500,000 years. Then in 1975 came the discovery of the skull 3733 in East Turkana, thought initially to date back to about 1.5 million years. Yet,