I wanted to like this so SO much, but it just dragged on. I love nonfiction, especially anything to do with anthropology and archeology, so when I saw this I thought it would be right up my alley. Certain parts were good, and I enjoyed reading them but I think this is just one book that would definitely have to be an audio read for me. The chapters just drag on with information and history that isn't all that relevant, in my opinion, and tries to get across a lot of information more difficult than necessary.

There is much about the business of field work, dealing with unstable governments, including civil war and tribal issues in Ethiopia. The book is mainly focused on Tim White, although he is not by far the only paleontologist. It feels slanted towards White’s viewpoints, with other’s such as the Leakeys treaded slightly less than ideal scientifically. White is not loved by all, in fact, known as a rabble rouser in the field, being brash and hard to get along with. Yet as the author states, holds science above all else, and his goals is always to the science.

I wouldn’t call this an easy read, but it is fascinating if you have any interest in the earliest of human fossils. The book covers just about everything about finding, researching and analyzing the fossils found that is known as Ardi, a new link in the evolution of humans, older than Lucy, but lesser known as White and others haven’t written popular books. Perhaps this is one that will help turn the tide.

Kermit Pattison's 'Fossil Men' beautifully blends the wonders of scientific exploration of human origins in a war zone with the almost soap opera atmosphere of academic feuds and paleoanthropological in-fighting.. It's both informative and entertaining as we follow the magnetic Tim White and his team scrabbling through the Ethiopian desert dirt to connect the dots of human evolution. This is a book with many side excursions, and every one is worthwhile as Pattison builds a tale of bloody-minded adventurers who not only advance their academic specialty, but also help create a vital anthropological academic community in Ethiopia itself. A great page-turning read.

Bone hunters
The fascinating quest for human ancestors

Michele Harris
michele.harris@erickson.com

It all started with a funny bone. In 1974, Donald Johanson, an American paleoanthropologist working in Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle, noticed something embedded in the sediment. Closer inspection revealed a fossilized ulna bone more commonly known as the “funny bone.”

Johanson and his team found more bones: a section of a skull, a piece of a pelvic bone, a bit of a jawbone. In all, they found about 40 percent of a single female skeleton.

They gave her the scientific name Australopithecus afarensis but after listening to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” play repeatedly on the camp tape deck, they nicknamed her Lucy.

At the time, Lucy was the oldest and most complete specimen of a human ancestor ever found. Lab testing estimated that she lived between 3.9–2.9 million years ago; sometime during the African Pliocene Epoch.

When Johanson published his findings, Lucy became an international sensation, embarking on a six-year U.S. tour.

Years later, an older and more complete skeleton was discovered but unlike Lucy, it was initially met with skepticism and disbelief by the scientific community.

Fossil men

Kermit Pattison explains all the drama behind what he calls “a paleo cold war,” in his new book, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind (Harper Collins).

It is a wild ride along a bumpy road populated by snakes and scorpions, war lords and bureaucrats, royalty and politicians, and brilliant scientists who are not above the petty rivalries of the common man.

With a diverse cast of fascinating characters, Pattison’s tale reads like the script of the next Indiana Jones film.

The main storyline focuses on Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist from U.C. Berkeley who has been called “the Steve Jobs of paleontology.” Part of the team that discovered Lucy, White is single-minded when it comes to fossil-hunting and his direct manner and tendency to poke holes in other scientist’s theses gained him few friends in the paleoanthropological community.

Other characters include Berhane Asfaw, once a political prisoner, he survived imprisonment and torture before becoming Ethiopia’s leading paleoanthropologist; Owen Lovejoy, a creationist turned paleoanthropologist; and a supporting cast of corrupt government officials, persnickety academics and gun-toting soldiers.

The trek

Pattison follows the team to the Ethiopian side of Afar Depression—a mecca for paleoanthropologists. It’s where many of the oldest fossils were found leading scientists to christen it “the cradle of evolution.”

As they trek through parched badlands, the team scans the terrain for fossils. A breakthrough comes when Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a young Ethiopian college student uncovers part of a hand bone. They went on to find fragments of a skull, mandible, teeth and arm bones.

Back in the laboratory, biological analysis of the fossils reveals that Ardi is 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than Lucy.

With Lucy, the world was introduced to a new species within a known genus. Ardi was both a new species and a new genus.

The world reacts

Unlike Lucy, Ardi soon became the unwelcome guest at the dinner table. She would shake the world of paleoanthropology by questioning the well-established “savanna paradigm” of human evolution.

The team believed that Ardi explains the origins of upright walking and shows that the previously held theory that humans evolved from chimps was wrong. Humans are more likely to share a common ancestor with apes.

After taking almost 15 years to complete their report, the Ardi team finally released their findings at a joint news conference from Washington, D.C. and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Oct. 1, 2009. They also published eleven papers about their discovery in Science magazine.

It didn’t take long for the scientific community to weigh in. They called the team’s conclusions “silly” and “laughable.” Their findings were largely dismissed with Time magazine going so far as to run a headline asking “Was Ardi not a human ancestor after all?”

Some attributed the lack of enthusiasm to Tim White’s mercurial personality. Others blamed something else–that the scientific community was heavily invested in a certain narrative and Ardi did not support that narrative. It directed the story of evolution in an entirely new direction.

The tree of life

Darwin relied on a tree model to describe human evolution. Darwin’s “great tree of life” was neat, with distinct branches growing straight out of a strong central trunk. Ardi illustrated a messy and illogical tree full of twisted and incomplete branches. It was hard for many in the scientific community to accept.

It took some time, but they finally came around.

Four years after the group made their findings public, a forum of scholars concluded that the team had been right. Ardi was indeed a primitive member of the human family.