Kermit Pattison - Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

'09 J. H. Matternes

For Maja

A man has come; a quarrel will come.

ETHIOPIAN PROVERB

Contents

T his book is a history of science and a detective story about the most fundamental mystery of all: where did we come from? Like any good mystery, it begins with a body.

My journey started when I became intrigued by an ancient cold casethe oldest known skeleton of a member of the human family. In 2012, I flew out to the University of California at Berkeley to meet one of the worlds most successful fossil hunters, and talk about his most recent major discoverya 4.4-million-year-old skeleton of the species Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed Ardi. Initially, I did not intend to write much about Ardi, which I envisioned as just a bit of background to the more interesting drama later in human evolution. The more I learned, however, the more unsettled I became because Ardi seemed to refute so many prevailing theories about evolution.

Ardi was an inconvenient woman, one who disturbed scholars of human origins more than many cared to admit. Her skeleton challenged core beliefs about how we became human, how our ancestors split from the other apes, how we came to stand upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and whether the savannas were truly the crucibles of humanity as depicted in countless museum dioramas and textbooks. Most importantly, it showed that these early human ancestors looked surprisingly unlike the modern chimpanzees often touted as models of the human past. In some aspects of anatomy, humans turned out to be more primitive than living African apes, a finding that reversed forty years of conventional wisdom. It is so rife with anatomical surprises, the discovery team reported of the skeleton, that no one could have imagined it without direct fossil evidence.

Fossils are often called bones of contention. But the odd thing about this skeleton was not controversy but the lack of it. Something very curious happened after Ardi was revealed to the world in 2009. A bombshell dropped and then... silence. The very people who should have been most excited by this discovery seemed to shrug off the findings. As I later discovered, there were myriad reasons: some peers vehemently disagreed with the conclusions; others dreaded engaging in arguments likely to end unpleasantly; and some sought to consign the fossil to irrelevance by ignoring it. Ardi, and the team that discovered her, seemed to be personae non gratae. One of them was even called He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

My curiosity was aroused. Anybody who must not be named certainly must be interviewed.

TIM WHITE, THE FRONT MAN OF THE ARDI TEAM, WAS A PALEOANTHROPOLOGIST , a scientist of the human fossil record, with a reputation for having a razor intellect, hair-trigger bullshit detector, short temper, long list of discoveries, and longer list of enemies. His department webpage at the University of California at Berkeley showed a picture that made him look like a warlord in the Ethiopian badlands surrounded by a security detail brandishing assault rifles.

White ignored my initial messages, except for a curt reply that he was busy in Ethiopia and would not make himself available. I persisted, and months later, he finally agreed to talk. He recently had returned from his annual fossil-hunting mission. and suffered from a fever with cyclical headaches. Ordered by his doctor to remain in bed, White cancelled all his classes for two weeks. Yet he rose and kept his appointment. Later I realized this was characteristic: White habitually sacrificed his own comfort, appearance, and health to advance his scientific mission.

To get to his office, I entered the massive Neo-Babylonian complex of the Valley Life Sciences Building on the Berkeley campus and walked past a life-size skeleton cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Like Ardi, it was an extinct bipedal creature unimaginable to modern eyes until it was actually found. I passed a small display with a replica of the famous Lucy skeleton, a human ancestor whose species, Australopithecus afarensis, White had co-named three decades earlier. I took an elevator to the fifth floor, knocked, and heard a groan from within. The door opened and there stood a skinny man, uncombed and rumpled, looking like hed been pulled from the bottom of the hamper.

I held out my hand to introduce myself. He bumped it with a clenched fist.

Ethiopian handshake, he deadpanned. You dont want to get what I have.

A huge snake skin hung on the office wall. White had killed and eaten the puff adder in Tanzania in his younger days, back when he remained on friendly terms with at least some of the Leakeys, the famous fossil dynasty and his former employers. Nearby hung a Victorian-era caricature of Darwin parodied as an apea reminder that scientific achievement is not always honored by contemporaries. Another cartoon depicted a Victorian evolutionist who more closely matched White in temperament, Thomas Henry Huxley, a pugnacious anatomist known as Darwins bulldog. A framed photo contained a snapshot of a hunchbacked man with an assault rifle; I later learned it was a friend from the Ethiopian desert whod been killed in tribal warfare.

White gestured for me to take a seat in an office lined with books and replicas of fossil skulls. We talked... and talked... and talked. About science, there seemed to be no end to his willingness to give time, fever be damned. He was encyclopedic, sarcastic, and uproariously impolitiche labeled one colleague a moron, another a bottom feeder, another a bozo, and chucked many more into a bulk bin of assholes. White seemed engaged in perpetual struggle against somebodycelebrity scientists, academic critics, university administrators, Ethiopian antiquities officials, journal editors, incompetents of all types, and so on. The loathing flowed both ways: some colleagues refused to attend conferences if White was present. At that moment, he was engaged in litigation against his own employer, after having sued the University of California over a pair of 9,500-year-old skeletons that the university wanted to hand over to Native American tribes. (White and his co-plaintiffs complained that the university had favored ideology over science.)

His longtime Ethiopian colleague Berhane Asfaw later explained:

Do you know why he is feared by his colleagues? If there is something wrong in the science, he will not be diplomatic. He will just tell you straightforwardthis is totally wrong. Most people will never say that and try to dodge the issue. Even if they are going to control his resources and deny him grant money, Tim will say, Forget it, the guy is wrong. If we dont tell him its wrong, it is like disseminating false information. That is why most people hate him. He is not nice to bad science.

These observations were echoed by geologist Maurice Taieb:

Tim White is brutal. Hes a real scientist. His literature will stay forever. He doesnt care about publishing books, being on media, et cetera. He wants to do the job before popularizing. People think he wants to keep for himself. No, no! He wants to be sure.

There was another view, of course. Don Johanson, who rose to fame with his discovery of Lucy, described his estranged partner White in dark terms:

He feels he has done so much work on these fossils himself that our colleagues who sit in their little air conditioned officesas Tim would saydont deserve to see these fossils. And besides, he would say very often, even if they did see the fossils they wouldnt even know what they were looking at. He degrades his colleagues with his ad hominem arguments, making people feel inadequate.