Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life by Martin Meredith

Author:Martin Meredith [Meredith, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, General, Science, Life Sciences, Evolution, Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9781586488383
Google: WxEgibme9wIC
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-05-10T02:09:36+00:00

The feud between the Leakeys and Don Johanson had become even more intense in the 1980s. In his account of discovering Lucy, published in 1980, Johanson, relying on hearsay and gossip, had made various disparaging remarks about the Leakeys. Richard Leakey described his book as ‘a cheap, journalistic slap at Mary and me’. Mary had been outraged by the ‘lies’ she claimed Johanson had written about her and her work, all the more so because of the help and hospitality she had offered him over the years. Among the errors to which the Leakeys pointed was a remark supposed to have been made by Louis Leakey when he first saw Zinj: ‘It’s nothing but a goddamned australopithecine’, Johanson reported him as saying, a word he had never been known to use. A television show in New York in 1981 in which Johanson and Richard Leakey sparred in public further exacerbated matters.

Leakey’s exploits in West Turkana now thrust him once more into the limelight. His team there had found not only Turkana Boy and the Black Skull but also remains of three types of Miocene apes, 17 million years old, two of which were new to science. In 1984, the New York Times devoted nearly an entire page to an article praising the Leakey family. Their ‘towering reputation’, it said, was well deserved.

Johanson, by contrast, had endured a lean period. He had not made a fossil discovery since 1977. His hopes of resuming his expedition to Hadar had been thwarted by a moratorium imposed by the Ethiopian authorities in 1982 on foreigners wanting to undertake palaeoanthropological research. One of the reasons for the ban had been Johanson’s admission in his book Lucy of his grave-robbing exploit in Hadar. When Johanson subsequently asked Leakey for permission to study new fossils in Kenya, Leakey had rebuffed him. ‘I consider you a scoundrel’, Leakey told him by letter.

Johanson’s next course of action sealed the rift. Banned from Ethiopia, shunned in Kenya, Johanson set his sights on Olduvai, hitherto regarded by the Leakeys as their backyard. Although Mary had retired from active fieldwork there in 1983 and had moved back to Nairobi, her lifetime’s work at Olduvai had given her an abiding interest in what happened there.

Without informing Mary, Johanson applied for permission from the Tanzanian authorities to carry out research at Olduvai. He only told Mary of his intentions shortly before leaving for Olduvai on a preliminary survey in 1985. Mary, according to Richard Leakey, found the news ‘terribly upsetting’. But Johanson was unrepentant. ‘In my mind’, he wrote in Lucy’s Child, ‘it was time to stop thinking of the Gorge as the Leakey’s living room. It deserved a future as well as a past’.

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