June 2001 Book Review nature.net Bookshelf
Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression
by Jon Kalb (Copernicus Books, 2001; $29) Hardball Among the Hominids
Fossil riches in the Horn of Africa have sparked decades of cutthroat competition.
Book review by John Van Couvering 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 Leakey 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.) | |
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