Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression

Natural History, June, 2001 by John Van Couvering

Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression, by Jon Kalb (Copernicus Books, 2001; $29)

History, they say, is written by the winners. If so, we may have been missing some good books. Jon Kalb's engrossing account of discovery and disappointment in the Afar region of Ethiopia may be one of the best first-person accounts of finding human fossils ever written. In 1971, as a restless and somewhat overmature graduate student in geology, Kalb--galvanized by the fossil-finding successes of well-financed French, American, and Kenyan groups working near the northern tip of Lake Turkana--decided to move his family to Ethiopia and put together his own expedition into the last unexplored segment of the East African Rift System. Alas, once the hominid remains began to turn up, Kalb was the first (but not the only) loser in the appalling academic brawl that ensued, even as Ethiopia was exploding in waves of murderous revolution. Threaded through this vivid story of fieldwork, paleoanthropological politics, and on-the-spot war reportage is Kalb's nervy struggle simply to stay in the game.

In these pages we are backstage for some of the great scenes in human paleontology, a long-running saga of triumphs and jealousies that might have been written by Giuseppe Verdi. Nearly fifty years had passed since Raymond Dart astounded the world With the discovery of the Taung skull in southern Africa, giving anthropologists a new human ancestor to fight over. In the 1970s in South African caves and East African rift valleys, especially Kenya's Turkana basin, discoveries and hard feelings were reaching a crescendo. At first, Kalb and his partner, French geologist Maurice Taieb, had the infernal landscape of Ethiopia's Afar Depression to themselves. It was a jagged wasteland of ovenlike heat, frantic mosquitoes, and unfordable, unsanitary rivers, with a local population that had a history of wiping out exploration parties. Describing how he and Taieb learned to get around in this terrible place (and how they began to find fossil beds wherever they looked), Kalb uses such vivid and compelling imagery that one wishes--almost--to have joined them there.

Some needed no urging. Not long after news that the Afar had fossil beds dating back millions of years reached the who's who of hominid paleontology that was entrenched around Lake Turkana, Kalb and Taieb were sought out by a young professor, Yves Coppens, representing the French presence in the area, as well as by an ambitious graduate student, Donald C. Johanson from the U.S. team. Louis Leakey, who had been sidelined by illness and politics after organizing the Kenyan contingent, was also eager to know more about the Afar fossils.

When Leakey and his wife, Mary, met Kalb at a congress of prehistorians at Addis Ababa in December 1971, Mary Lea. key stressed the importance of Kalb's not trusting anybody when it came to hominid fossils. As it turned out, she couldn't have been more prescient. From that time onward, the action in Kalb's story quickens inexorably as it dawns on everyone that the Afar is the biggest, the most fossiliferous, and (surely) the most newsworthy of all the fabled locales in human evolution. The Afar Depression, however inaccessible a hellhole, appeared to be the one remaining place on earth that had geological potential for a paleoanthropological bonanza. (As Kalb notes, however, there's always the Sudan.)

Various accounts exist of what happened, but the central facts are the same in all of them: In late 1972 Kalb and Taieb signed an agreement to cooperate with their French and American partners and were jointly awarded a permit by the Ethiopian government's Antiquities Administration to study the geology and paleontology of nearly 13,000 square miles of the Afar's Awash River valley. In October 1973 Johanson came across hominid remains--australopithecine leg bones--as the team was exploring at Hadar (in the northern part of the concession). Just eleven months later, Kalb was forced out. Kalb claims that the reason given by the director of the Antiquities Administration was that a rumor of his connection with the CIA had been brought to their attention by Johanson. Within months, his former partners Taieb and Johanson announced the discoveries of "Lucy" and of the 2.3-million-year-old "First Family," a cache of 214 fossil bones and teeth of early hominids of both sexes and different ages found in a single locality.

Kalb, meanwhile, managed to retain a corner of the original concession--in the Middle Awash valley, where nobody had yet explored. He assembled another team, and sure enough, in May 1975, they found a vast trove of Acheulean hand axes and cleavers, "the artifacts so dense in places that they [could] be seen from an airplane at 2,000 feet." In October 1976, in the same place, they found the 600,000-year-old Bodo cranium.

Three proposals for work in the Middle Awash went to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1977 from Kalb's eminently qualified associates at Southern Methodist University, New York University, and Harvard--and all three were rejected. The following year, Kalb was expelled from Ethiopia on six days' notice. The bitterest part of the book is Kalb's dry description of how the area of the Middle Awash was then taken over by J. Desmond Clark and his associates from the University of California, Berkeley, who had previously obtained, an overlapping permit.