Your Atomic Self by Curt Stager

Author:Curt Stager
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250018854
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

Bones and Stones

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

—Aldo Leopold

By blending water and minerals from below with sunlight and CO2 from above, green plants link the earth to the sky.

—Fritjof Capra

It’s not every day that someone presents you with a bone from the hand of a prehuman ancestor.

When it happened to me in 1988, I was a young scientist on assignment for National Geographic magazine in northern Kenya. I had arrived at the National Museum in Nairobi the previous day, thrilled to meet the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who had been featured in television documentaries and magazine articles that I had enjoyed since childhood. Soon afterward he would lose the lower portions of his legs in the crash of a small plane like the one that would take me to one of his remote study sites. But this flight ended safely on a dusty strip of sand and gravel on the parched western shore of Lake Turkana, where I would encounter signs of the atomic connections among all of humanity and the earth itself.

From the air Lake Turkana resembles a muddy greenish-blue ribbon of water stretching 170 miles from the mouth of the Omo River in the north to a barrier of lava rock and volcanic cinder cones in the south. The shape of the lake reflects that of the Great Rift Valley, a system of gigantic tectonic cracks in the African continent that extends from the Red Sea to Malawi. The inland sea is brackish, so it is of little use to humans as a source of drinking water. But for the hardy people who wander the harsh desert terrain with their cattle, goats, and camels, the namesake Turkana and other pastoralists, this is home. And for scientists such as Leakey and his colleagues, this place also opens windows on the full sweep of human history.

As we approached the makeshift landing strip at the West Turkana fossil camp, I could see that the lake used to be much larger. Parallel stripes from former beaches graded into the forbidding landscape of thornbushes, low bluffs, and dry gulches.

“The farther you walk from the shoreline,” the pilot explained as he banked the plane over a small cluster of tents, “the farther back in time you go. These beds were laid down a few thousand years ago, but the ones over there are closer to two million years old. If you keep on going all the way out to those mountains on the horizon, you’ll be walking on dinosaur fossils.”

Lake sediments are good hunting grounds for old bones because they cover and shield them from gnawing animals and the erosive forces of weather. Over time, minerals from the sediments also replace some or all of the original material with sturdier stuff that won’t decay even if the fossil is later unearthed. This alone would make West Turkana

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