Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [60]
An American geologist, Jon Kalb, had made extensive surveys of the area during the 1970s. Based in Addis Ababa, Kalb had initially played a major role in helping to establish the International Afar Research Expedition, but he soon fell out with Johanson and went on to launch his own group, the Rift Valley Research Mission, obtaining a government permit to explore the Middle Awash. According to Kalb, Johanson set out to wreck this rival group. Among the tactics he used was to spread rumours in Ethiopia and the United States that Kalb was working as an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. In his account of his time in Ethiopia—Adventures in the Bone Trade—Kalb wrote of ‘the cutthroat competition and backstabbing’, the ‘treachery and bloodletting’ that plagued palaeoanthropological research there. Despite the progress he had made in the Middle Awash, Kalb’s request in 1978 for funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation were rejected. That same year, he and his family were expelled from Ethiopia. In a report on these events to U.S. Vice President George Bush, a senior NSF official, Jerome Fregeau, observed in 1982: ‘The exceedingly cut-throat level of competition in Eastern African anthropology is a long-standing problem. NSF cannot be blamed for it....’ Nevertheless, in 1987, as a result of legal action, the National Science Foundation was obliged to issue a public apology for its own part in the affair.
The new Middle Awash Research Group, starting fieldwork in 1991, was led by Tim White from the University of California at Berkeley, and an Ethiopian geologist, Giday WoldeGabriel, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Exploring an area near the small village of Aramis in 1992, a Japanese member of the team, Gen Suwa, saw the glint of a hominid molar lying amidst a mass of pebbles. In the days that followed, other bits of teeth and bone were uncovered. Among them was the lower right jaw of a child, with a milk molar still attached. It was spotted by Alemayehu Asfaw, the Ethiopian researcher who had discovered the first jawbone of Lucy’s species at Hadar in 1974. Its significance was quickly realised. The milk molar was so primitive that it clearly belonged to a species that was older than Lucy’s species. In all, bone fragments from seventeen individuals were retrieved, including the base of a skull and three arm bones.
Announcing their discovery in the columns of Nature in 1994, the Middle Awash group reported that they had found remains of the earliest known hominid, dating back 4.4 million years, nearly 1 million years older than the oldest known specimen of afarensis. The provisional name they gave to it was Australopithecus ramidus, drawn from the Afar word ramid, meaning ‘root’. Ramidus was described by White as ‘the most apelike hominid ancestor known’. It shared many traits with chimpanzees but it also possessed features—notably its teeth— that had evolved after chimpanzees had split from the line leading to humans and that tied it to later hominids.
As well as describing the fossils, the Middle Awash group analysed the environment inhabited by ramidus. Their evidence was that it was well-wooded terrain, teeming with forest-dwelling wildlife; notably absent were savannah species. The possibility that early hominids were bipedal forest-dwellers rather than residents of the savannah was at odds with conventional wisdom. The common view was that they had adopted upright walking after emerging from the cover of trees to enable them to forage over greater distances on the savannah. But what was missing from the Middle Awash group analysis was conclusive evidence that ramidus in fact walked upright—the defining