Horizon by Barry Lopez

Author:Barry Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2019-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

THE ONGOING ACADEMIC and popular debates about human origins—about exactly where the line of human descent lies among hominoids in the human evolutionary family—captivated my imagination as a young man, so much so that I boldly wrote the well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey when I was nineteen, asking if I could work as a camp boy at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (Tanganyika at that time), naïvely and self-importantly wishing to make myself part of his and his wife Mary’s efforts to learn more about where we came from. The Leakeys had brought the search for the origins of mankind into people’s living rooms in the early 1960s with a series of spectacular finds at Olduvai: the fossil bones of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and a robust australopithecine. (Kamoya and Nzube were both working with the Leakeys at Olduvai at the time I wrote to Louis.)

Louis and I were not able to put a plan together that would bring me to East Africa during the time they were working there, but many years later, still keenly interested in human origins, I wrote to his son Richard, by then himself a well-known paleoanthropologist, especially because of work he’d conducted in northern Kenya around Lake Turkana. I asked to visit with him at his sites at Nariokotome and Koobi Fora. Richard wrote back to say yes, please come, and extended an invitation to visit him first in Nairobi, where I could view the collection of hominin skulls at the National Museums. Then, he wrote, we’d travel together up to Nariokotome. When I inquired about spending some time in the field, if possible, actually searching for hominid fossils with Kamoya Kimeu and his colleagues, Richard arranged for me to go with them to Nakirai, a camp east of Lodwar where Kamoya had been working for a while. (Nakirai was the Turkana designation for that place situated among acacia trees along the Kerio River where we were to camp. Kamoya told me it means “the place of the jackals.”)

What interested me about Nakirai—and Nariokotome and also Koobi Fora on the east side of Lake Turkana—was the certainty that seeing them would add greatly to my sense of what the search for human origins looked and felt like. Most of the academic discussion about human origins tends to speculate on how Homo sapiens came to be, based on relatively scant (and somewhat problematic) fossil evidence. Too often, it seemed, these earnest disagreements drifted toward tedious and pedantic sparring. The chance to work alongside people like Kamoya, searching for the residue of ancestors tens of thousands of generations removed from us, a chance to experience the physical place where a large portion of the evidence has come from, promised something richer than what I had been gleaning over the years from the pages of Science and Nature.

In the spring of 1984, during a visit to New York to see my ailing stepfather, I saw an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History featuring many of the most famous hominin fossils.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.