Chapter 33 29 THE RESTLESS APESOME

TIME ABOUT A million and a half years ago, some forgotten genius of the hominidworld did an unexpected thing. He (or very possibly she) took one stone and carefully used it to shape another. The result was a simple teardrop-shaped hand axe, but It was the world's first piece of advanced technology. It was so superior to existing tools that soon others were following the inventor's lead and making hand axes of their own. Eventually whole societies existed that seemed to do little else. “They made them in the thousands,” says Ian Tattersall. in Africa where you literally can't move without stepping on them. It's strange because they aequite intensive objects to make. It was as if they made them for the sheer pleasure of it."

From a shelf in his sunny workroom Tattersall took down an enormous cast, perhaps a foot and a half long and eight inches wide at its widest point, and handed it to me. It was shaped like a spearhead, but one the size of a stepping-stone As a fiberglass cast it weighed only afew ounces, but the original, which was found in Tanzania, weighed twenty-five pounds. “It was completely useless as a tool,” Tattersall said. “It would have taken two people to lift it adequately, and even then it would have been exhausting to try to pound anything with it.” "What was it used for then?" Tattersall gave a genial shrug, pleased at the mystery of it. “No idea. It must have had some symbolic importance, but we can only guess what.”

The axes became known as Acheulean tools, after St. Acheul, a suburb of Amiens in northern France, where the first examples were found in the nineteenth century, and contrast with the older, simpler tools known as Oldowan, originally found at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. older textbooks, Oldowan tools are usually shown as blunt, rounded, hand-sizedstones. In fact, paleoanthropologists now tend to believe that the tool part of Oldowan rocks were the pieces flaked off these larger stones, which could then be used for cutting. Now here's the mystery. When early modern humans—the ones who would eventually become us—started to move out of Africa something over a hundred thousand years ago, Acheulean tools were the technology of choice. These early Homo sapiens loved their Acheulean tools, too. carried them vast distances. Sometimes they even took unshaped rocks with them to make into tools later on. They were, in a word, devoted to the technology.

But although Acheulean tools have been found throughout Africa, Europe, and western and central Asia, they have almost never been found in the Far East. In the 1940s a Harvard paleontologist named Hallum Movius drew something called the Movius line, dividing the side with Acheulean tools from the one without. The line runs in as southeasterly direction across Europe and the Middle East to the proximity of modern-day Calcutta and Bangladesh. Beyond the Movius line, across the whole of southeast Asia and into China, only the older, simpler Oldowan tools have been found. We know that Homosapiens went far beyond this point, so why would they carry an advanced and treasured stonetechnology to the edge of the Far East and then just abandon it?

“That troubled me for a long time,” recalls Alan Thorne of the Australian National University in Canberra. “The whole of modern anthropology was built round the idea that humans came out of Africa in two waves—a first wave of Homo erectus, which became JavaMan and Peking Man and the like, and a later, more advanced wave of Homo sapiens, which displaced the first lot. Yet to accept that you must believe that Homo sapiens got so far with their more modern technology and then, for whatever reason, gave it up. It was all very puzzling, to say the least.” As it turned out, there would be a great deal else to be puzzled about, and one of the most puzzling findings of all would come from Thorne's own part of the world, in the outback of Australia. In 1968, a geologist named Jim Bowler was poking around on a long-dried lakebed called Mungo in a parched and lonely corner of western New South Wales when something very unexpected caught his eye. Sticking out of a crescent-shaped sand ridge of a type knowns a lunette were some human bones. At the time, it was believed that humans had been in Australia for no more than 8,000 years, but Mungo had been dry for 12,000 years. So what was anyone doing in such an inhospitable place?

The answer, provided by carbon dating, was that the bones' owner had lived there when Lake Mungo was a much more agreeable habitat, a dozen miles long, full of water and fish, fringed by pleasant groves of casuarina trees. To everyone's astonishment, the bones turned out to be 23,000 years old. Other bones found nearby were dated to as much as 60,000 years. This was unexpected to the point of seeming practically impossible. At no time since hominids first arose on Earth has Australia not been an island. Any human beings who arrived there must have come by sea, in large enough numbers to start a breeding population, after crossing or more of open water without having any way of knowing that a convenient landfall awaited them. Having landed, the Mungo people had then found their waymore than two thousand miles inland from Australia's north coast—the presumed point of entry—which suggests, according to a report In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “that people may have first arrived substantially earlier than 60,000 years ago.”

How they got there and why they came are questions that can't be answered. According to most anthropology texts, there's no evidence that people could even speak 60,000 years ago, much less engage in the sorts of cooperative efforts necessary to build ocean-worthy and colonize island continents. “There's just a whole lot we don't know about the movements of people before recorded history,” Alan Thorne told me when I met him in Canberra. “Do you know that when nineteenth-century anthropologists first got to Papua New Guinea, they found people in the highlands of the interior, in some of the most inaccessible terrain on earth, growing sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are native to South America. So how did they get to Papua NewGuinea? We don't know. But what is certain is that people have been moving around with considerable assuredness for longer than traditionally thought, and almost certainly sharing genes as well as information.”

The problem, as ever, is the fossil record. “Very few parts of the world are even vaguely amenable to the long-term preservation of human remains,” says Thorne, a sharp-eyed man with a white goatee and an intent but friendly manner. “If it weren't for a few productive areas like Hadar and Olduvai in east Africa we'd know frighteningly little. And when you look elsewhere, often wedo know frighteningly little. The whole of India has yielded just one ancient human fossil, from about 300,00 years ago. Between Iraq and Vietnam—that’s distance of some 5,000 kilometers—there have been just two: the one in India and a Neandertal in Uzbekistan.” He grinned. “That’s not a whole hell of a lot to work with. You’re left with the position that you've got a few productive areas for human fossils, like the Great Rift Valley in Africa and Mungo here in Australia, and very little in between. It's not surprising that paleontologists have trouble connecting the dots."

The traditional theory to explain human movements—and the one still accepted by the majority of people in the field—is that humans dispersed across Eurasia in two waves. The first wave consisted of Homo erectus, who left Africa remarkably quickly—almost as soon ged asem a species—beginning nearly two million years ago. Over time, as they settled in different regions, these early erects further evolved into distinctive types—into Java Man and Peking Man in Asia, and Homo heidelbergensis and finally Homo neanderthalensis in Europe. Then, something over a hundred thousand years ago, a smarter, lither species of creature—the ancestors of every one of us alive today—arose on the African plains and began radiating outward in a second wave. Wherever they went, according to this theory, these new Homosapiens displaced their duller, less adept predecessors. Quite how they did this has always been a matter of dispute. No signs of slaughter have ever been found, so most authorities believe the newer hominids simply outcompeted the older ones, though ay contributors also "Perhaps we gave them smallpox," suggests Tattersall. "There's no real way of telling. The one certainty is that we are here now and they aren't."

These first modern humans are surprisingly shadowy. We know less about ourselves, curiously enough, than about almost any other line of hominids. It is odd indeed, as Tattersallnotes, “that the most recent major event in human evolution—the emergence of our ownership spec —is perhaps the most obscure of all.” Nobody can even quite agree where truly modern humans first appear in the fossil record. Many books place their debut at about 120,000 years ago in the form of remains found at the Klasies River Mouth in South Africa , but not everyone accepts that these were fully modern people. Tattersall and Schwartz maintain that “whether any or all of them actually represent our species still awaits definitive clarification.”

The first undisputed appearance of Homo sapiens is in the eastern Mediterranean, around modern-day Israel, where they began to show up about 100,000 years ago—but even there they are described (by Trinkaus and Shipman) as “odd, difficult-to-classify and poorly known.” Neandertals were already well established in the region and had a type of tool kit known as Mousterian, which the modern humans evidently found worthy enough to borrow. No Neandertal remains have ever been found in north Africa, but their tool kits turn up allover the place. Somebody must have taken them there: modern humans are the only candidate. It is also known that Neandertals and modern humans coexisted in some fashion for tens of thousands of years in the Middle East. “We don't know if they time-shared the same space or actually lived side by side,” Tattersall says, but the moderns continued happily to use Neandertal tools—hardly convincing evidence of overwhelming superiority. No less curiously, Acheulean tools are found in the Middle East well over a million years ago, but scarcely existed in Europe until just 300,000 years ago. Again, why people who had the technology didn't take the tools with them is a mystery. For a long time, it was believed that the Cro-Magnons, as modern humans in Europe became known, drove the Neandertals before them as they advanced across the continent, eventually forcing them to its western margins, where essentially they had no choice but to fall in the sea or go extinct. In fact, it is now known that Cro-Magnons were in the far west of Europe at about the same time they were also coming in from the east. “Europe was a prettyempty place in those days,” Tattersall says "They may not have encountered each other all that often, even with all their comings and goings." One curiosity of the Cro-Magnons' arrival is that it came at a time known to paleoclimatology as the Boutellier interval, when Europe was plunging from a period of relative mildness into yet another long spell of punishing cold. Whatever it was that drew them to Europe, it wasn't the glorious weather. In any case, the idea that Neandertals crumpled in the face of competition from newly arrived Cro-Magnons strains against the evidence at least a little. Neandertals were nothing if not tough. For tens of thousands of years they lived through conditions that no modern human outside a few Polar scientists and explorers have experienced. During the worst of the ice ages, blizzards with hurricane-force winds were common. Temperatures routinely fell to 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Polar bears padded across the snowy vales of southern England. Neandertals naturally retreated from the worst of it, but even so they will have experienced weather that was at least as bad as a modern Siberian winter. They suffered, to be sure—a Neandertal who lived much past thirty was lucky indeed—but as a species they They were magnificently resilient and practically indestructible. They survived for at least a hundred thousand years, and perhaps twice that, over an area stretching from Gibraltar to Uzbekistan, which is a pretty successful run for any species of being. Quite who they were and what they were like remain matters of disagreement and uncertainty. Right up until the middle of the twentieth century the accepted anthropological view of the Neandertal was that he was dim, stooped, shuffling, and simian—the quintessential caveman. painful accident that prodded scientists to reconsider this view. In 1947, while doing fieldwork in the Sahara, a Franco-Algerian paleontologist named Camille Arambourg took refuge from the midday sun under the wing of his lightairplane. As he sat there, a tire burst from the heat , and the plane tipped suddenly, striking hima painful blow on the upper body. Later in Paris he went for an X-ray of his neck, and noticed that his own vertebrae were aligned exactly like those of the stooped and hulking Neandertal. Either he was physiologically primitive or Neandertal's posture had been misdescribed. Infact, it was the latter. Neandertal vertebrae were not simian at all. It changed utterly how reviewed Neandertals—but only some of the time, it appears. It is still commonly held that Neandertals lacked the intelligence or fiber to compete onequal terms with the continent's slender and more cerebrally nimble newcomers, Homosapiens. Here is a typical comment from a recent book: “Modern art humans neutralized thisadvantage [the Neandertal's with better clothing, better fires and better shelter; meanwhile the Neandertals were stuck with an oversize body that required more food to sustain.” In other words, the very factors that had allowed them to survive successfully for a hundred thousand years superb. Above all the issue that is almost never addressed is that Neandertals had brains that were significantly larger than those of modern people—1.8 liters for Neandertals versus 1.4 formodern people, according to one calculation. This is more than the difference between modern Homo sapiens , a species we are happy to regard as barely human. The argument put forward is that although our brains were smaller, they were somewhat how more efficient. I believe I speak the truth when I observe that nowhere else inhuman evolution is such an argument made. So why then, you may well ask, if the Neandertals were so stout and adaptable and cerebrally well endowed, are they no longer with us? One possible (but much disputed) answer is that perhaps they are. Alan Thorne is one of the leading proponents of an alternativetheory, known as the multiregional hypothesis, which holds that human evolution has beencontinuous—that just as australopithecines evolved into Homo habilis and Homoheidelbergensis became over time Homo neanderthalensis, so modernHomo sapiens simplyemerged from more ancient Homo forms.Homo erectus is, on this view, not a separate species but just a transitional phase. Thus modern Chinese are descended from ancient Homo erectus forbears in China, modern Europeans from ancient European Homo erectus, and so on. “Except that for me there are no Homo erectus,” says Thorne. “I think it's a term which has outlived its usefulness. For me, Homo erectus is simply an earlier part of us. I believe only one species of humans has ever left Africa, and that species is Homo sapiens.” Opponents of the multiregional theory reject it, in the first instance, on the grounds that it requires an improbable amount of parallel evolution by hominids throughout the Old World—in Africa, China, Europe, the most distant islands of Indonesia, wherever they appeared. believe that multiregionalism encourages a racist view that anthropology took a very long time to rid itself of. In the early 1960s, a famous anthropologist named Carleton Coon of the University of Pennsylvania suggested that some modern races have different sources of origin that commemorate from implying more superior stock than others. This heard back uncomfortably to earlier beliefs that some modern races such as the African “Bushmen” (properly the Kalahari San) and Australian Aborigines were more primitive than others. Whatever Coon may personally have felt, the implication for many people was that someraces are inherently more advanced, and that some humans could essentially constitute different species. The view, so instinctively offensive now, was widely popular in many respectable obscure places. before me a popular book published by Time-Life Publications in 1961 called The Epic of Man based on a series of articles in Lifemagazine. In it you can find such comments as “Rhodesian man . . . lived as recently as25,000 years ago and may have been an ancestor of the African Negroes. His brain size was close to that of Homo sapiens.” In other words black Africans were recently descended from creatures that were only “close” to Homo sapiens. Thorne emphatically (and I believe sincerely) dismisses the idea that his theory is in any measure racist and accounts for the uniformity of human evolution by suggesting that there was a lot of movement back and forth between cultures and regions. “There's no reason to suppose that people only went in one direction," he says. "People were moving all over the place, and where they met they almost certainly shared genetic material through interbreeding. New arrivals didn't replace the indigenous populations, they joined them. They became them." He likes the situation to when explorers like Cook or Magellan encountered remote peoples for the first time. “They weren't meetings of different species, but of the samespecies with some physical differences.” What you actually see in the fossil record, Thorne insists, is a smooth, continuous transition. “There's a famous skull from Petralona in Greece, dating from about 300,000 years ago, that has been a matter of contention among traditionalists because it seems in some ectusHo but in other ways Homo sapiens. Well, what we say is that this is just what you would expect to find in species that were evolving rather than being displaced.” One thing that would help to resolve matters would be evidence of interbreeding, but that is not at all easy to prove, or discover, from fossils. In 1999, archeologists in Portugal found the skeleton of a child about four years old that died 24,500 years ago. The skeleton was modern overall, but with certain archaic, possibly Neandertal, characteristics: unusually sturdy legbones, teeth bearing a distinctive “shoveling” pattern, and (though not everyone agrees on it) an indentation at the back of the skull called a suprainiac fossa, a feature exclusive to Neandertals. Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, the leading authority on Neandertals, announced the child to be a hybrid: proof that modern humans and Neandertals interbred. Others, however, were troubled that the Neandertal and modern features more weren't blended. As one critic put it: “If you look at a mule, you don't have the front end looking like a donkey and the back end looking like a horse.” Ian Tattersall declared it to be nothing more than “a chunky modern child.” He accepts that there may well have been some “hanky-panky” between Neandertals and moderns, but doesn't believe it could have resulted in productively successful offspring. 1 “I don't know of any two organisms from any realm of biology that are that different and still in the samespecies,” he says. With the fossil record so unhelpful, scientists have turned increasingly to genetic studies, in particular the part known as mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA was only discovered in 1964, but by the t 1980s some ingenious souls at the University of Basilisk reassigned features that lend it a particular convenience as a kind of molecularclock: it is passed on only through the female line, so it doesn't become scrambled with paternal DNA with each new generation, and it mutates about twenty times faster than normal nuclear DNA, making it Easier to detect and follow genetic patterns over time. By tracking therates of mutation they could work out the genetic history and relationships of whole groups of people. In 1987, the Berkeley team, led by the late Allan Wilson, did an analysis of mitochondrial DNA from 147 individuals and declared that the rise of anatomically modern humans occurred in Africa within the last 140,000 years and that “all present-day humans were descended from that pop It was a serious blow to the multiregionalists. But then people began to look a little more closely at the data. One of the most extraordinary points—almost too extraordinary to credit really—was that the “Africans” used in the study were actually African -Americans, whose genes had obviously been subjected to considerable mediation in the past few hundred years. Doubts also soon emerged about the assumed rates of mutations. By 1992, the study was largely discredited. But the techniques of genetic analysis continued to be refined, and in 1997 scientists from the University of Munich managed to extract and analyze some DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man, and thistime the evidence stood The Munich study found that the Neandertal DNA was unlike any DNA found on Earth now, strongly indicating that there was no genetic connection between Neandertals and modern humans. Now this really was a blow to multiregionalism. 1One possibility is that Neandertals and Cro-Magnons had different numbers of chromosomes, a complication that commonly arises when species that are close but not quite identical conjoin. In the equine world, for example, horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys 62. Mate the two and you get an offspring with areproductively useless number of chromosomes, 63. you have, in short, a sterile mule. Then in late 2000 Nature and other publications reported on a Swedish study of themitochondrial DNA of fifty-three people, which suggested that all modern humans emerged from Africa within the past 100,000 years and came from a breeding stock of di0 more vids than in10,0 Afterward, Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research, announced that modern Europeans, and perhaps people farther afield, are descended from “no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently 0 as 25,0 " As we have noted elsewhere in the book, modern human beings show remarkably little genetic variability—“there’s more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population,” as one authority has put it—and this would explain why. Because we are recently descended from a small founding population, there hasn't been time enough or people enough to provide a source of great variability. It seemed a pretty severe to multiregionalism. “After this,” a Penn State academic told the Washington Post, "People won't be too concerned about the multiregional theory, which has very little evidence." But all of this overlooked the more or less infinite capacity for surprise offered by the ancient Mungo people of western New South Wales. In early 2001, Thorne and his colleagues at the Australian National University reported that they had recovered DNA from the oldest of the Mungo specimens—now dated at 62,000 years—and that this DNA proved to be “genetically distinct.” The Mungo Man, according to these findings, was anatomically modern—just like you and me—but carried an extinct genetic lineage. His mitochondrial DNA is no longer found inliving humans, as it should be if, like all other modern people, he was descended from people who left Africa in the recent past. “It turned everything upside down again,” says Thorne with undisguised delight. Then other even more curious anomalies began to turn up. Rosalind Harding, a population geneticist at the Institute of Biological Anthropology in Oxford, while studying betaglobingenes in modern people, found two variants that are common among Asians and the indigenous people is in Australia, Africa. The variant genes, she is certain, arose more than 200,000 years ago not in Africa, but in east Asia—long before modern Homosapiens reached the region. The only way to account for them is to say that ancestors of people now living in Asia included archaic hominids—Java Man and the like. Interestingly, this same variant gene—the Java Man gene, so to speak—turns up in modern populations in Oxfordshire. Confused, I went to see Harding at the institute, which inhabits an old brick villa on Banbury Road in Oxford, in more or less the neighborhood where Bill Clinton spent his student days. Harding is a small and chirpy Australian, from Brisbane originally, with the rareknack for being amused and earnest at the same time. “Don't know,” she said at once, grinning, when I asked her how people in Oxfordshire harbored sequences of betaglobin that shouldn't be there. “On the whole,” she went on more somberly, “the genetic record supports the out -of-Africa hypothesis. But then you find these anomalous clusters, which most geneticists prefer not to talk about. There's huge amounts of information that would be available to us if only we could understand it, but we don't yet. We've barely begun.” She refused to be drawn out on what the existence of Asian-originenes in Oxfordshire tells us other than that the situation is clearly complicated. “All we can say at this stage is that it is very untidy and we don 't really know why." At the time of our meeting, in early 2002, another Oxford scientist named Bryan Sykes had adjusted produced a popular book called The Seven Daughters of Eve in which, using studies of mitochondrial DNA, he had claimed to be able to trace nearly all living back to Europeans afounding population of just seven women—the daughters of Eve of the title—who lived between 10,000 and 45,000 years ago in the time known to science as the Paleolithic. To each of these women Sykes had given a name—Ursula, Xenia, Jasmine, and so on—and even adetailed personal history. (“Ursula was her mother's second child. The first had been taken by a leopard when he was only two. . . .”)When I asked Harding about the book, she smiled broadly but carefully, as if not quite certain where to go with her answer. “Well, I suppose you must give him some credit for helping to popularize a difficult subject,” she said and paused thoughtfully. “And there remains the remote possibility that he's right.” She laughed, then went on more intently: “Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If you follow themitochondrial DNA backwards, it will take you to a certain place—to an Ursula or Tara or whatever. But if you take any other bit of DNA, any gene at all, and trace it back, it will take you somewhere else altogether.” It was a little, I gathered, like following a road randomly out of London and finding that eventually it ends at John O'Groats, and concluding from this that anyone in London must therefore have come from the north of Scotland. , of course, but equally they could have arrived from any of hundreds of other places. In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. “No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story,” she said. So genetic studies aren't to be trusted? “Oh you can trust the studies well enough, generally speaking. What you can’t trust are the sweeping conclusions that people often attach to them.” She thinks out-of-Africa is “probably 95 percent correct,” but adds: “I think both sides have done a bit of a disservice to science by insisting that it must be one thing or the other. Things are likely to turn out to be not so straightforward as either camp would have you believe. The evidence is clearly starting to suggest that there were multiple migrations and dispersals indifferent parts of the world going in all kinds of directions and generally mixing up the genepool. out." Just at this time, there were also a number of reports questioning the reliability of claims concerning the recovery of very ancient DNA. An academic writing in Nature had noted howa paleontologist, asked by a colleague whether he thought an old skull was varnished or not, licked its top and announced that it was. “In the process,” noted the Nature article, “large amounts of modern human DNA would have been transferred to the skull,” rendering it useless for future study. I asked Harding about this. “Oh, it would almost certainly have been contaminated already," she said. "Just handling a bone will contaminate it. Breathing on it will contaminate it. Most of the water in our labs will contaminate it. We are all swimming inforeign DNA. In order to get a reliably clean specimen you have to excavate it in sterile conditions and do the tests on it at the site. It is the trickiest thing in the world not tocontaminate a specimen.” So should such claims be treated dubiously? I asked. Harding nodded solemnly. “Very,” she said. If you wish to understand at once why we know as little as we do about human origins, I have the place for you. It is to be found a little beyond the edge of the blue Ngong Hills in Kenya, to the south and west of Nairobi. Drive out of the city on the main highway to Uganda, and there comes a moment of startling glory when the ground falls away and you are presented with a hang glider's view of boundless, pale green African plain. This is the Great Rift Valley, which arcs across three thousand miles of east Africa, marking the tectonic disruption that is setting Africa adrift from Asia. Here, perhaps forty miles out of Nairobi, along the baking valley floor, is an ancient site called Olorgesailie, which once stood beside a large and pleasant lake. In 1919, long after the lake had vanished, a geologist named JW Gregory was scouting the area for mineral prospects when he came across a stretch of open ground littered with anomalous dark stones that had clearly been shaped by human hand . He had found one of the great sites of Acheulean tool manufacture that IanTattersall had told me about. Unexpectedly in the autumn of 2002 I found myself a visitor to this extraordinary site. Iwas in Kenya for another purpose altogether, visiting some projects run by the charity CAREInternational, but my hosts, knowing of my interest in humans for the present volume, hadinserted a visit to Olorgesailie into the schedule. After its discovery by Gregory, Olorgesailie lay undisturbed for over two decades beforethe famed husband-and-wife team of Louis and Mary Leakey began an excavation that isn'tcompleted yet. What the Leakeys found was a site stretching to ten acres or so, where toolswere made in incalculable numbers for roughly a million years, from about 1.2 million yearsago to 200,000 years ago. Today the tool beds are sheltered from the worst of the elementsbeneath large tin lean-tos and fenced off with chicken wire to discourage opportunisticscavenging by visitors, but otherwise the tools are left just where their creators dropped themand where the Leakeys found them. Jillani Ngalli, a keen young man from the Kenyan National Museum who had beendispatched to act as guide, told me that the quartz and obsidian rocks from which the axeswere made were never found on the valley floor. “They had to carry the stones from there,” hesaid, nodding at a pair of mountains in the hazy middle distance, in opposite directions fromthe site: Olorgesailie and Ol Esakut. Each was about ten kilometers, or six miles, away—along way to carry an armload of stone. Why the early Olorgesailie people went to such trouble we can only guess, of course. Notonly did they lug hefty stones considerable distances to the lakeside, but, perhaps even moreremarkably, they then organized the site. The Leakeys' excavations revealed that there wereareas where axes were fashioned and others where blunt axes were brought to be resharpened. Olorgesailie was, in short, a kind of factory; one that stayed in business for a million years. Various replications have shown that the axes were tricky and labor-intensive objects tomake—even with practice, an axe would take hours to fashion—and yet, curiously, they werenot particularly good for cutting or chopping or scraping or any of the other tasks to whichthey were presumably put. So we are left with the position that for a million years—far, farlonger than our own species has even been in existence, much less engaged in continuouscooperative efforts—early people came in considerable numbers to this particular site to makeextravagantly large numbers of tools that appear to have been rather curiously pointless. And who were these people? We have no idea actually. We assume they were Homoerectus because there are no other known candidates, which means that at their peak—theirpeak —the Olorgesailie workers would have had the brains of a modern infant. But there is nophysical evidence on which to base a conclusion. Despite over sixty years of searching, nohuman bone has ever been found in or around the vicinity of Olorgesailie. However muchtime they spent there shaping rocks, it appears they went elsewhere to die. “It's all a mystery,” Jillani Ngalli told me, beaming happily. The Olorgesailie people disappeared from the scene about 200,000 years ago when the lakedried up and the Rift Valley started to become the hot and challenging place it is today. Butby this time their days as a species were already numbered. The world was about to get itsfirst real master race, Homo sapiens . Things would never be the same again.