Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [64]
It took Pickford ten years to wreak revenge. In 1995, he launched a vitriolic attack on Leakey in a book, written in collaboration with a Kenyan colleague, entitled Richard E. Leakey: Master of Deceit, accusing him of every kind of malpractice. Pickford’s co-author, Eustace Gitonga, was a former employee of the National Museums, the head of its exhibits department, whom Leakey had fired after accusations that he had misused funds. The book’s dedication read: ‘This book is for the victims of the fantastic Richard Leakey manipulations, most of whom didn’t know what hit them’.
Pickford and Gitonga next plotted to outmanoeuvre Leakey and the museum establishment by setting up their own museum enterprise. With Pickford’s help, Gitonga founded the Community Museums of Kenya in 1997, persuading government politicians to grant it legal status equal to the National Museums with the right to issue its own research permits. ‘No longer is paleontology in Kenya the monopoly of a single family or institution’, Gitonga wrote in a letter to the journal Science. ‘Kenyans have recuperated their heritage’. He added: ‘Scientists of good faith from anywhere in the world now have a choice to carry out research in Kenya, something that was not possible for the first 35 years of the country’s independence’.
Gitonga lost no time in proposing research permits for Pickford and in October 1998, the Kenya Paleontology Expedition (KPE), a joint venture between the Community Museums and Pickford’s institution, the Collège de France in Paris, was duly authorised to carry out research in three Kenyan provinces, including the Tugen Hills where Andrew Hill’s Baringo Paleontological Research Project had been at work continuously since 1981. When Andrew Hill, from his base at Yale University, learned that Pickford had begun work in the Tugen Hills, he immediately protested. The National Museums supported his protest and Pickford’s permit was revoked by government officials.
But not only did Pickford continue to work in the Tugen Hills, in March 2000 he invaded Meave Leakey’s site at Kanapoi, seeking evidence to undermine her claims about anamensis. Word of his arrival there soon reached Richard Leakey, at the time the head of Kenya’s civil service. He immediately instigated Pickford’s arrest on the grounds that he had been collecting fossils illegally and intended to export them to France. On leaving Kanapoi, Pickford was intercepted by police and held in prison for five days, charged with illegal excavation. In April, however, prosecutors dropped the case. Claiming that the whole affair had been nothing more than an attempt at intimidation, Pickford and the Community Museums sued the Kenya government, the National Museums of Kenya and Leakey, alleging unlawful arrest, false imprisonment and malicious harassment. ‘All of this business, all of these dirty tricks, come from Richard Leakey’, Pickford told a journalist in Paris. ‘It is all about egotism and power and keeping a grip on what he sees as the family business. Ever since the 1960s, the Leakeys have believed that they have exclusive rights to control all palaeontological exploration in Kenya’.
Despite the furore, members of the Kenya Paleontology Expedition soon resumed work in the Tugen Hills. In October 2000, a renowned fossil-hunter, Kiptalam Cheboi, found fragments of a jawbone with teeth attached lying on the surface in a remote area called Kapsomin. Two weeks later, Pickford and Senut arrived on the scene and recovered in all twelve more fossils from at least five individuals, including a thighbone, from four sites in the Lukeino Formation.
At a press conference in December, Pickford and Senut triumphantly announced they had found the earliest known member of the human family calling it the ‘Millennium Ancestor’. ‘Not only is this find older than any other previously