We landed at Swartkrans, because there were buses of tourists at Sterkfontein, and no one else here.
‘The oldest bones on earth have been found here,’ Mike said, and led us through the cave system, down a narrow path. White bones like fragments of flint and chalk protruded from the wall. Looking closely I could easily discern molars, vertebrae, long hollow limb bones, talons and canines and obvious chunks of skull, every vertical surface was covered with bits of smashed bone.
At the base of the cave, Mike said, ‘This site contains the evidence of the first controlled use of fire by early man anywhere in the world. That was probably the single major pivotal point in human evolution a million years ago. Imagine what a difference fire made. It gave humans the ability to master their environment and to become the most destructive species in the history of the planet.’
The remains of prehistoric hand-made bone tools had also been found in the cave, as well as evidence that the humans there had been the prey of large animals. The site at Swartkrans had been excavated since the 1930s, Mike said, and two types of early hominids co-existed here almost two million years ago, homo erectus and homo robustus. But the cave had been continuously occupied for those two million years. Besides early man, animals had also used it as a lair. It had served as a shelter for African pastoralists for hundreds of years. During the Boer War this cave had been used by Boer soldiers. And more recently such caves had been the hideouts of African guerrillas in the struggle to overthrow the white government.
With Sybilla working the controls, we flew into a remote gully and had a picnic by a cold spring, among twittering birds and ochre butterflies and watching hawks.
‘Humans evolved here,’ Mike said. ‘Right here where we’re sitting. We’ve found stone tools, and bones, and everything else. Africa was perfect for evolution. But you want to know something?’
Sybilla had been combing her long hair by the spring. She looked up at Mike, and I too tore my attention away from the comb-tugs fluttering Sybilla’s hair and gave him my full attention.
‘Probably none of those bones are those of our direct ancestors.’
‘I thought that was Adam and Eve in the cave back there.’
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Mike asked. ‘There’s a guy you have to meet. He’s got this amazing theory.’
The man to whom Mike introduced me in a sushi bar in an upscale Johannesburg mall was Professor Lee Berger. He was head of the Paleoanthropological Unit for Research and Exploration at the University of Witwatersrand. A paleoanthropologist studies ancient humans, but Professor Berger has said that this science of taking the widest view of history is ‘one of the greatest privileges… of being human.’ It was a vast search into our own elusive ancestry.
He had published a book in 2000, elaborating his research, In the Footsteps of Eve. A genial American from Georgia, in his late thirties, his theory was that humankind’s direct ancestor was probably not among any of the bones or fossil forms that had been dug up in Africa or anywhere else. Yes, humanoid species had been found and the forms were more related to us than to chimps. But while that was extraordinarily close, it was not a direct link to us. Our actual ancestor had not been found.
I said, ‘What about these people who report startling findings? “The ancestor of man.” There was one just this year.’
‘Kenyanthropus,’ Professor Berger said. He was smiling. ‘Imagine naming a new genus, just like that. And so quickly — three weeks between the submission of the research findings and the acceptance.’
‘So you don’t buy it?’
He said, ‘Paleoanthropologists are competing for money and grants, so they tend to make earth-shaking pronouncements about finding our ancestors. If you need money for research it helps to make headlines.’
Professor Berger’s forthrightness and skepticism, his insistence on presenting fossils in the right context, his habit of doubting and demanding proof, had earned him many admirers and some enemies. Because paleoanthropology involved so much interpretation and ‘emotional resonance,’ rivalries were inevitable and competition among scientists and fossil hunters was intense. He said that the Leakeys, competitive within their own family, had not found Adam in Olduvai Gorge, and for him the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton that I had seen in Addis Ababa was not Eve, but rather a three-foot-tall bipedal ape with a chimp-like jaw.
‘She’s in our family tree. We were an ape until two million years ago. We became erectus — had skills, learned to control fire, learned hunting, got weapons. But the Lucy fossil is probably a dead end.’
‘Family tree’ was not an expression he used much, and in fact he said that such a concept misrepresented the progress of our origins. The notion of a tree was too simple for being so linear, for the pattern of our ancestry more likely resembled a ‘complex bush.’
Disputing fossil finds had given him some predictable supporters, among them Creationists who believed literally in Adam and Eve, and the Flood, and Lot turning into a pillar of salt. Taking Professor Berger’s words out of context Creationists cited his work as evidence that Darwin and his heresies were nothing but a low trick in getting God out of America’s schools.
But it was understandable that little was known about our ancestors, he said. ‘The study of human origins is only thirty or forty years old. That’s all. Before then it was like stamp collecting.’
Professor Berger had come to South Africa via Kenya in the 1980s. He had worked with Richard Leakey on a dig in Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya. At that time South Africa awaited discovery. Because of the Nationalist Party, which came to power in 1948, and the academic boycott that was called because of the white supremacist policies of that party, there was no digging at all in South Africa for forty years — no work in paleoanthropology, and no finds from 1948 until 1989. Just as bad, a great deal of fossil material that had been found earlier was useless because it was undated.
‘It’s not like Europe, where they have lake sites. Lake sites are easily datable. We didn’t have vulcanism. No geochemical signals. No one here knew exactly what they had found.’
In 1990, when Professor Berger started seriously looking for fossils, there were only five established early hominid sites in South Africa. ‘But there were dozens of caves — dozens and dozens,’ he said. ‘I began by walking in the bush around Krugersdorp’ — Swartkrans was near there — ‘and I’d see a cave and we’d dig and find fossils. There were fossils everywhere. We started digging in Gladysville and two weeks later we found fossils of hominids. In some caves we found hominids that had been preyed upon by saber-toothed cats — no, not the other way around.’
Talking about Africa, the larger meaning the fossils had, Professor Berger lost his circumspection and spoke of ‘the incredible binding power of fossils,’ how they brought people together. The lesson of evolution in Africa was not tribalism and division, but cooperation.
‘Every critical event in the development of homo sapiens has come out of Africa,’ he said.
In his book In the Footsteps of Eve he had written,