Wade Davis - September 24, 2002
VANISHING CULTURES, ENDURING LIVES
Wade Davis
Anthropologist; National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence
One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways - who still feel their paths in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way; just to know that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive and intellectual choices that our lineage happened to make many generations ago. But whether it is the Buddhists who still pursued the breath of the dharma in Tibet, the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the voodoo acolytes in Haiti or the yak herders in the slopes of Qomolangma, all of these people teach us that there are other ways of being, of thinking, of orienting yourself in the universe and that's an idea that can only fill you with hope.
Together the myriad cultures of the world make up an intellectual, spiritual and social web of life that envelopes the planet and is as important to the well being of the planet as the biological web of life known as the biosphere. At National Geographic we have coined the term ethnosphere to create an organizing principle of this cultural web of life. Think of the ethnosphere as the sum total of all thoughts, dreams and ideas, myths and intuitions, brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of humanity's consciousness. And just as the biosphere is being severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere - if anything at a far greater rate.
When each of you was born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on earth. A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical structures, it's a flash of the human spirit; it's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the world. Of those 6,000 languages, half are not being taught to schoolchildren, meaning that effectively they're already dead. What this means is that within a single generation we're living through a time when half of humanity's legacy is being lost. The term ethnosphere begins to create a symbol of hope and the possibility that through conscious effort we can reverse this cataclysmic trend. I want to take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, or at least on those few sketchy journeys that I have made over the course of my career as an anthropologist, ethnobotanist and writer.
As a young anthropologist, fresh out of college, I never understood how I was expected to turn up at some village - perhaps of the Barasana in the northwest Amazon of Colombia, a people who believe that metaphorically and mythologically they came up the Milk River from the east in sacred canoes dragged behind the bellies of the anaconda - and announce that I was there for six months. They were going to house and feed me and I was there to study their private lives; if someone did that to us, turning up on our doorstep, we'd call the police. So I early on learned to seek the proper conduit to culture: the right way or the right metaphor to break down the inherent barrier that existed by definition between myself and a people with whom I found myself living as a guest. If, for example, I wanted to live with the Barasana - a people so dependent on the forest that cognitively they do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of that forest - the obvious conduit to culture, the metaphor, was the botanical realm, and that's why I became a plant explorer.
The Story of a Landscape
Very often it is landscape that holds the key to character. One of our great poets in Canada, Gilles Vigneault, understood this when he said, "My country is not a country, it is the winter," because indeed in Canada it is the weight of the north that hovers in the national psyche and sweeps over the national soul to create the essence of who we are as a people. Let's travel for a moment to the deserts of northern Kenya, to the homeland of the Samburu, the Rendille, the Ariaal and the Boran, a place known as the "anvil of the sun" - a place where drought is not some kind of cruel anomaly but rather a regular feature of climate and therefore a spark of adaptation. For these pastoral nomads, who live by the strength of their cattle and camels, surviving drought is the key imperative that makes them who they are.
In order to survive those critical moments of extreme desiccation, it's extremely useful to have herds as large as you possibly can. But in order to have great herds of camel and cattle, it's helpful to have great numbers of children; if you want to have great numbers of children it's also convenient to have great numbers of wives. So it shouldn't surprise us that the society is polygamous, and it's not unusual for a single man, an elder, to have four, five or even six wives. But this creates a problem: What do you do with the young men who grow up without having women of marriageable age? If you're an elder you control the power of the magic; you solve your problem by dispatching the young men to remote encampments at the edge of your known social and political world, where they protect your herds and raid the enemy to secure animals from the rival herds.
So the young men are made into warriors a critical moment of their lives. But there still remains the problem of the human libido. The society solves this problem by allowing the warriors to come back in the shadow of darkness. As long as they go nowhere near the manyattas of the married women with their children, they're openly encouraged to seek the young maidens who they can take as steady partners. Pre-marital sexual liaisons are absolutely accepted, but pre-marital pregnancy is severely taboo. So the warrior is allowed to have relations with this young girl until she is betrothed to one of these elders. The young warrior is not only encouraged to go to the public wedding ceremony where the elder takes his young girlfriend into matrimony but to openly mock the virility of the old goat who has taken away his young girlfriend. So you begin to see how a single imperative - surviving drought - bifurcates through a culture and makes the people who they are.
This idea of looking to landscape as a key to character came to me reflexively because I grew up in the remote reaches of Canada in northern British Columbia. I had a series of those jobs as a youth that only our socialist government could create. They made a park of 3 million acres without having the foggiest idea what lay within the boundaries - what became known as a Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Park. My job description as the first park ranger was deliciously vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two four-month seasons I saw eight people. There was no one to relate publicly to, so with my horse I simply wandered. I came upon an old native grave at the headwaters of the Stikine River that said, "Love Old Man Antoine, died 1926." Curious as to the origin of the grave, I paddled my canoe across the headwater lake chain to a hunting camp where I found this man Atehena, a Gitxsan elder whose name means "he who walks leaving no tracks." Alex had buried the man, a legendary shaman, there in 1926. Intrigued by this link in a single generation between a living elder that I could actually speak with and an old shaman of the landscape, I quit my job as a park ranger and tried for two further seasons to pry from Alex's memory the myths of the origin of the land.
Alex was happy to speak of survival: When the winters blew so cold the families had to decide which of the young would live and which would be abandoned to the wolves to die. But he never remembered any legends or stories until one day, by chance, one of our hunters killed a moose, took the trophy and abandoned the carcass in the bush. I put my canoe on the float of our plane, flew to the headwaters of this particular river, chased away a pack of wolves from the kill and came with 1,800 pounds of moose meat, which Alex admired when he saw me land at our shore. As we went to get the horses to drag the meat to the smokehouse to cure it for his winter supply he suddenly said, "Gee it's a funny thing. I think I got a story for you. Come by my place tonight." And that night I began to record 30 years of trickster/transformer tales of We-gyet, the anthropomorphic figure of folly, of Gitxsan lore. All these tales were stories of moral gratitude played out against landscape. I once asked old man Alex how long the cycle of tales was, and he said that as a child he'd ask his father the same question and to figure it out they'd snapped on snow shoes in March, a time of good ice, and begun to walk from one end of their lake to the other - 20 miles there, 20 miles back - and the story wasn't halfway done. To measure the duration of a sacred tale, you can't simply set a time piece; you must move through sacred geography, telling the story as you go along.
The Most Curious of Plants
I've always been drawn to the resonance of elders and I've always been graced by great mentors, not only indigenous leaders like Alex but academic scholars like Richard Evans Schultes, the man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the so-called "magic" mushrooms in Mexico in 1938. He was the greatest living Amazonian explorer, a man for whom mountains in South America and indeed national parks have been named. At age 19 I stumbled into his office. He was such an Anglophile that one of his colleagues once said of him that the only way he could go native would be to go to London. So when I said to him I was from British, as in British Columbia, that's all it took. I said to him, "I've saved up money in a logging camp and I want to go to South America like you did and collect plants." This is a man Prince Philip had called the father of ethnobotany. Instead of asking for my credentials, he looked across a mound of specimens with his antiquated bifocals and said very simply, "Well, son, when do you want to go?" Two weeks later I was in the Amazon, where I stayed for a year and a half.
One of his tips was that I should begin an investigation with his protégé, a young botanist named Tim Plowman, of a plant known to the Inca as a divine leaf of immortality. This was a dream academic grant of the 1970s, a quarter of a million dollars to study the ethnobotany, taxonomy and biogeography of the plant that is a source of the curious alkaloid, cocaine. We knew that during the time of the Inca this plant had been revered as no other; you could not approach a shrine in the time of the Incan Empire if you did not have coke in your mouth. Unable to cultivate the plant at the elevation of the imperial capital of Cusco, the plant was replicated in gold and silver leaf in fields that color the landscape. To this day in the Andes, no gesture can occur that is not mediated by a gift to the earth of this most curious of plants; no child can be brought into the realm of the living; no elder can be led into the realm of the dead.
Even though this was a plant that had been used for over 4,000 years and even though efforts to eradicate the fields had been underway for over 60 years, nobody had ever done a nutritional study of the plant. What we discovered absolutely embarrassed our backers at the government because we found out that the plant had a small amount of alkaloid in it - roughly half to 1 percent dry weight, roughly analogous to the amount of caffeine in a coffee bean - but it also was chock full of vitamins. It also had more calcium in it than any plant that had ever been studied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which made it perfect for a diet that traditionally lacked a dairy product. It had enzymes that enhanced the body's ability to digest carbohydrate at high elevation, which made it perfect it for the Andean potato-based diet. So in one elegant scientific assay we put into stark profile the draconian efforts that are still underway to eradicate the traditional fields of a plant that's been used with no evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for 4000 years by the pre-Columbian peoples of America.
Interpreting Voodoo
Even though they're often accused of embracing a kind of extreme relativism, anthropologists do not call for the elimination of judgment in the study of human societies. The most exciting thing that anthropologists do is quite the opposite: we call for the suspension of judgment so that the judgments that we're ethically obliged to make can be informed ones. The anthropological end comes most usefully into focus when it is turned at those societies that have been unjustly pilloried for beliefs that the outsider, who's doing that judgment, understands little at all. No society exemplifies that more than the wondrous civilization and culture of Haitian vodoun. In 1982, I was asked by Schultes, my great professor, whether I would like to go to Haiti for a couple of weeks to seek the drugs used to make zombies. Of course I said yes, having no idea that the assignment would consume four years of my life. And like everybody else who first embraces the wonder of this remarkable world-view, I had to come to terms with my own clichés, drawn from generations of pulp fiction and B-movies.
Voodoo is most certainly not a black magic cult. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world you would say - Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity - but there's always one continent left out: sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African people had no religion. By ethnographic definition they did, and all voodoo is a distillation of very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. It became sown in the fertile soil of the new world. In many ways voodoo is a quintessentially democratic faith, because the individual not only has direct access to the divine, they actually - through the act of spirit possession, through the ritual moment invoked by the power of the song, the rhythm of the drums, the intensity of the prayer - become the god themselves. You see remarkable evidence of faith, such as people handling burning embers with impunity, an astonishing example of the mind's ability to dominate the body that bears it, when catalyzed in a state of extreme excitation.
Voodoo is not an animistic religion; the voodooist does not believe that a rock has an internal soul, but they do believe that the spirits are wise enough to dwell in places of great natural beauty. The voodooist is drawn to those places very much in the spirit that we're drawn to a cathedral: We don't go there to worship the building; we go there to be in the presence of God. For the people of Haiti there is no more sacred place than a waterfall known as Saut d'Eau, in central Haiti. Once each year, during the month of July, as many as 15,000 acolytes dressed in white robes begin to slowly move across the limestone escarpment of central Haiti, moving toward this pilgrimage destination where they suddenly gather beneath the spreading branches of an enormous mapou tree that soars over this waterfall, which is illuminated by the glow of 10,000 candles that are scattered upon the mapou's branches. The waterfall is a symbol of Damballah-Wedo, the serpent god of Dahomey, and when the water first fell this great spirit, who is also the repository of all spiritual wisdom, saw the rainbow reflected Ayida-Wedo and he fell in love with the image of the rainbow and their love entwined them in a cosmic helix from which all life was born. In the same sense that people expose themselves to burning coals to prove the power of their faith, a man goes into the waterfall, allowing the water to literally tear the clothes, the rags, off his body, so that like the snake that sheds its skin to emerge renewed for the following year, he will be spiritually and psychologically renewed for the coming months.
Zombies and Jim Crow
Like with all the peoples of equatorial west Africa, the manipulation of poisons is a most ubiquitous trait of material culture. There was indeed a drug used to make zombies; it was based on a neurotoxin derived from a fish, a neurotoxin 160,000 times stronger than cocaine as an anesthetic, a thousand times stronger than sodium cyanide as a drug - a lethal dose of which would balance on the head of a pin, and that could bring on a state of death so profound that it could fool a western-trained physician. The identification of this preparation allowed us to take the whole zombie phenomenon from the realm of the phantasmagoric into the realm of the plausible, and we discovered that zombification is a form of social sanction created by the secret societies of Haiti. It was a marvelous investigation because it allowed us to take a phenomenon that had been used in an explicitly racist way to denigrate a people and show its foundation in culture, in pharmacology, in history and indeed in the spirit and psychological realm.
Why do we have this image of voodoo as something evil? The U.S. Marine Corps occupied Haiti between 1915 and 1936 and everybody above the rank of sergeant got a book contract. Those books had names like Cannibal Cousins, Black Baghdad, Voodoo Fire in Haiti, Puritan in Voodoo Land, The White King of La Gonave, The Magic Island. They gave rise to the RKO movies of the '40s, Night of the Living Dead, Zombies on Broadway, Zombies of the Stratosphere. In any other era they would have been forgotten, but they essentially said at that time to the American people, during the era of Jim Crow, that any country where such abominations occurred could only find its redemption through military occupation. In fact, we discovered that zombification was not a random, insane mad act but it had a purpose within the structure of society. But by the same token you could not measure the richness of this world by that single institution any more than you could measure the richness of American democracy by the existence of capital punishment.
The Spirit of the Nomads
I wrote a book called The Serpent and the Rainbow that chronicled these adventures in Haiti. It was made into one of the most dreadful Hollywood movies ever, so I went and disappeared in Borneo. I always wanted to live in a place wet with the innocence of birth, and I always wanted to live in a nomadic society - because we all were once nomads, wanderers on a pristine planet. I wanted to go to the heart of Borneo, to the headwaters of the rivers that drain the east Malaysian state of Sarawak into the South China Sea; rivers that had been the habitual homeland of the Dyak head hunters who could not marry if they did not present the severed head of an enemy to a prospective father-in-law. Too often the heads were Penan, so the Penan retreated into the forest where for generations they lived totally dependent on that forest homeland.
Nomads are profoundly different than we are. In a nomadic society, sharing becomes an involuntary reflex because you never know who will be the next to secure the food for the table. The wealth of a society of nomads is literally measured by the strength of the human relationships between people: If that social solidarity is corroded, then the survival of every individual is suddenly in peril. I have given individual cigarettes to Penan women in remote encampments and watched as they've torn apart the cigarette to distribute the individual strands of tobacco equitably to every household in the encampment, rendering the product useless, but honoring their obligation to share.
For generations the Penan lived of that forest, by that forest and with that forest; responding not only to their physical needs but also to their spiritual needs. Now, sadly, if you go to the forest of the Penan, the sounds you hear are of machinery. Brazil in 1985 produced roughly 3 percent of the tropical log exports of the world; close to 60 percent was produced by the federal state of Malaysia, much of it from the homeland of the Penan in the east Malaysian state of Sarawak. Within a single generation the Penan saw their homeland pierced by logging roads; they stood stunned as their forests were torn to the ground. They watched as their women were reduced to prostitution and servitude in the logging camps. Rivers became so polluted with siltation that it seemed to the Penans as if half of Sarawak, half of Borneo, was being dragged to the South China Sea where the Japanese freighters were ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the heart of the homeland. Suddenly the children were in settlement camps where they were exposed to diseases never previously known.
The Penan took it for a while and then suddenly in 1985 rose up. What began as a quixotic gesture, blow-pipes against bulldozers, in time led to an uprising across the entire state, which electrified the entire environmental community of the world. But they were no match for the power of the Malaysian state and the resistance collapsed. And when I went back to Sarawak a couple of years ago on assignment for the National Geographic, I found myself living within the last 17 families of nomadic Penan, a people that as recently as in the year of my birth were 30,000 strong, living in that immense and beautiful forest homeland.
This touches upon the dark undercurrent of this presentation, and that is the idea that a hundred years hence, this century will not be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations but as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. It's neither change nor technology that threatens culture; it is the crude face of domination and power. These are not quaint colorful societies on the margins of history destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples that are being driven out of existence by identifiable forces: diseases that sweep into the homeland of the Yanomami in the wake of the discovery of gold, or the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan. The Ogoni in the Niger Delta in Nigeria can no longer farm their once fertile soils because they have been rendered toxic by effluent from the petrochemical industry. If you realize that these cultures are not fated to fade away but have been driven out of existence by human beings, it suggests that human beings can also be facilitators of cultural survival.
Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned by all human beings, but ethnocide, the destruction of a people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it remains in many circles promoted as appropriate development policy. Nowhere is this more powerfully expressed than in the ancient mountainous homeland of the Tibetan people. In the last few years I've been focusing almost all of my fieldwork in Tibet and Nepal. Tibet, a nation that has been dominated by the Chinese to the extent that since that invasion in 1959, 1.2 million Tibetan people have been killed and not only have the people been laid waste, but the institutions of culture, of government, of religiosity have been torn apart brick by brick, even strafed from the air by modern jet fighters in what can only be described as a systematic act of ethnocide by the Chinese government.
Yet despite all this, the will of the Tibetan people remains remarkably intact. They still pursue the breath of the Dharma, they still embrace the notion that through prayer, meditation and ritual practice they can do the most critical act required of human beings, which is the seeking of the liberation of all sentient beings. Their spirit remains a symbol of hope for all of us, as indeed does the fate and the plight and the new condition of the Inuit people of my homeland of Canada. Canada has not always been kind to the Inuit; quite the contrary. When the British first reached the Arctic they took the Inuit to be savages; the Inuit took the British to be gods. Both were wrong, but one did more to honor the human race. There could be no better measure of intelligence and genius than the ability to survive in an environment where your entire material technology was limited to what you could carve from bones, stones, slate and small bits of wood. The Inuit didn't fear the cold; they took advantage of it. And they moved lightly upon the land. When European explorers did the same they achieved great feats of discovery.
But mostly the Europeans brought their own environment with them, rather than adapting to a new one. When the last of Lord Franklin's men were found dead at starvation cove in the Adelaide Peninsula, it became graphically evident that the British had disdained the use of dogs. They had no problem putting their own young men in leather harnesses, dragging behind them an iron and oak sled that weighed 900 pounds. On that sled was a dory that weighed 500 pounds, inside of which were all the accoutrements of a British officer's dinner service. This they somehow expected to drag through the immense boreal forest of Northern Canada with the hope that they might bump into a Hudson Bay post and achieve liberation. Well, they died a terrible death.
Travel Lightly
The Inuit traveled lightly on the land and no better story exemplifies that than an anecdote I secured from a man named Orliac, a village elder from a place called Arctic Bay, whom I went narwhal hunting with several years ago at the very tip of Baffin Island. He told me the story of his grandfather. During the 1950s, in order to establish Canadian sovereignty over an archipelago that could easily have gone back to the British or to another European power, the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. This man's grandfather categorically refused to go. Fearful for his life, the family took away all of his tools and weapons, thinking that would force him into the settlement. Did it? No. In the middle of an Arctic night, the blackness outside and a blizzard raging, this old man simply stepped outside of the igloo and pulled down his caribou hide trousers and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze he shaped it into the form of a blade. As the knife took shape he put a spray of saliva along the edge to create a sharp edge. Firmly frozen, the shit knife became the implement that allowed him to butcher a dog. He skinned the dog, improvised a harness from the skin and a sled from the ribcage, harnessed up an adjacent dog and disappeared over the ice flows. Now talk about getting by with nothing.
In a way, this is a great symbol of the resilience of culture, because in April 1999, in an incredible gesture of national restitution, the Canadian government has created the new homeland of Nunavut. It's our latest province, an area of land the size of Texas and California put together, with total administrative control by 26,000 Inuit people, who also control 80 percent of the known mineral resources. It is such a symbol of hope and possibilities because in the end we really have a choice.
Reversing the Trend
Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony, or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? The great anthropologist Margaret Mead said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted toward this blandly amorphous generic world culture, not only would the entire range of the human imagination be progressively reduced to a more and more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake one day as from a dream, having forgotten that there ever were even other possibilities.
This then becomes the symbol of what we're trying to do with the ethnosphere project at the National Geographic. We are going to send parties out to the farthest reaches of the ethnosphere to come back with stories that are so inherently dazzling that they will not fail to fill your eyes and your ears, your hearts with wonder. By doing that we will try to at least bear witness to the history of our times and do our own part to celebrate the wonder of who we are as a people.
All of these cultures are not failed attempts at being us; they're not failed attempts at modernity. With their dreams and their prayers, their myths and they memories, they teach us that there are indeed other ways of being, alternative visions of life, death, birth and creation itself. And when asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. It's within this diversity of knowledge and practice of intuition and interpretation, of promise and hope, that we will all rediscover the enchantment of being what we are: a conscious species, aware of our place in the planet, and fully capable not only of doing no harm, but of ensuring that all creatures in every garden find a way to flourish.
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: How do you avoid permanently changing the remote societies you have visited by the sheer fact of your presence? Does that ever worry you?
A: That's another question that expresses our own inherent reflexive and subconscious hubris - the idea that these people would be so fragile, that somehow my very presence could disrupt their traditions that go back for generations. Of course, if it's a society that's been not exposed to Western diseases, one has to be extremely careful for obvious reasons. But in general, my experience has been that these are incredibly dynamic, vital societies that not only enjoy the contact with the outsider but look to the traveler or to the anthropologist as a real comrade and an ally in their own particular struggles. One of the wonderful things happening now in anthropology is that indigenous people are becoming anthropologists: They're coming to study us. I've had more native people in my house in the last five years than I've been in the houses of them. There's now this whole world culture; this interwoven web of the ethnosphere in which it's no longer a case of we as scientists observing the other, but rather as we as humanity engaging each other in our common struggle for survival.
Q: Do you think that our society will ever advance to the point where they progressively legalize marijuana?
A: You don't want to get me going on the subject of the war on drugs, but since you gave me an opening - Barbara Tuchman once defined folly as a state in which a nation, though fully in possession of the facts, nevertheless persists to act against its own self-interest. A hundred years from now the war on drugs is going to be seen as the greatest act of folly of this nation. We spend $29 billion on the war on drugs and, as 9/11 suggested, we have been fighting the wrong war.
Look very briefly at what the war on drugs has brought us: it's compromised our judiciary because our judges can no longer follow their sacred task of making proper and wise decisions because of minimum mandatory sentencing laws; it's compromised our police forces because some percentage of the seizure assets go to the local police departments; it's compromised our inner city and our racial relationships because we fill our prisons with young men, most of them black; we've created crack cocaine trade in the inner city when the engine driving that train is not the inherent legitimacy or interest or pharmacology of the drug, but the economics of the market that moves the drug. We've torn apart a sovereign country, Colombia, which has not had a civil war for 40 years. They had a civil war between 1948 and 1956, then peace reigned until we became addicted to cocaine. What drives the war in Colombia, what has torn apart that country, which has led to the murder of thousands of people, is of course our consumption.
Let's look at this assumption that drug use would automatically go up if the drugs were decriminalized. By most statistics roughly 95 million Americans have tried illicit drugs. I've never met anyone whose decision to use or not use drugs had anything to do with their legal status, have you? Of those 95 millions, roughly 5 million Americans regularly use marijuana, which is defined as once or more a week, which is not excessive use of a substance. Five hundred thousand people use other substances, illicit substances, on that same regular basis. But what's the real statistic? 90 million Americans have been exposed to illicit drugs and have forged a good relationship with them, a relationship based on abstinence.
The people fighting the war on drugs - it's amazing how little they know about human drug use. Tobacco only became a dangerous drug in this country with the invention of the cigarette and the development of mild strains of tobacco that allowed for the inhalation of the smoke deeply into the lungs. The first morphine addict, incidentally, was the wife of the man who invented the hypodermic syringe. I would argue that these drugs have already come into our culture; we've already adapted to them and if cocaine was legal tomorrow, I don't think many of us in this room would race to the local pharmacy. We've all learned that it's a really lousy drug and if the Grateful Dead hadn't sung about it and instead it had been promoted as the analogue of what the dentist gives you when he pulls your teeth, it probably never would have gotten the cache that it got in the '70s. But whatever the risks of legalization and decriminalization are, the known consequences of prohibition are so much more severe. So not only am I in favor of the medical use of marijuana - and I must say I'm not speaking for the National Geographic now - I believe in the decriminalization of all drugs, the sooner the better.
| Louise Leakey - November 4, 2002
DISCOVERING OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS
Louise Leakey
Ph.D., Paleoanthropologist; National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence
In 1931, my grandparents went to Olduvai Gorge and had this conviction that they were going to find remains of human origins there. It took them until 1959 before they actually found concrete evidence of human origins, but those early expeditions had plenty of excitements en route. Many a car fell into a ditch, and the roads they built across the Ngorongoro Highlands used to take them seven days - a journey which you can do today in a single day.
My grandfather, Louis, and my grandmother, Mary, worked very hard throughout the early '30s and '40s to try and find remains of fossil hominids that may have made the stone tools that litter the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. They were hard-pressed for funding and formed the Leakey Foundation in the early days to channel money to that research and make it the science that we know today.
In 1959, the discovery of Zinjanthropus - a robust australopithecine - was the turning point for them. My grandmother was walking down the gorge one day when Louis was unwell up in camp with the flu, and she found the specimen and went running up to tell him that she finally had it. He was instantaneously better. The world knew about this find, and it really helped them, from then on, to get funding for the research. They put in a huge excavation in the hopes of finding more remains from this individual, and nothing more came of this find. But not too far from it they found remains of another species of hominid.
The research moved slightly farther north. They went up to Lake Turkana, in the Rift Valley. It's a very long lake, about 160 miles in length, and around the modern-day lake basin you have many fossiliferous deposits. Lake Turkana is about a third of the size of New England, so the fossil deposits cover a significant area.
On the eastern shores of Lake Turkana, they put up basic tented camps and started their initial forays inland on camels - a very romantic way to go through these deposits. They soon realized that camels were not the best means of transport and resorted to planes and Land Rovers. In 1972 they came up with the remains of an important find called 1470. My mother was very anxious to get her hands on sticking this beautiful fossil together, and in fact it's something we still squabble about today - we love doing these jigsaw puzzles.
I grew up pretending to enjoy what I was doing. Very long days - hot, boring. They spoke much of Pithecanthropuses, all sorts of anthropus and pithecuses and all the rest of it. Those days weren't my best times. I would try to look interested sometimes, and then occasionally we genuinely were excited and involved in the whole field and got busy carrying bits of fossils across from the exposure. When they actually fitted, we thought that was great fun. The first time I really got involved was when we started to work with my mother on the west side of Lake Turkana at a place called Lomekwi. The site there is dated around about 3.5 to 3.2 million years. There, at the end of the field season - most of the fossils are found at the very end of any field season, in the last ten days, so you really only might as well go up there for those ten days - we were desperately trying to get out of camp because there were several bandit groups in the area. We really needed to move on. One of the Turkana field workers found a brow ridge under the ground and when my mother began to excavate it, it led to quite an interesting couple of years - it took nine months to clean up in the lab in Nairobi. After subsequent study we realized it looked like 1470, which was found in 1972 from the east side of Lake Turkana. That is one and a half million years later in time and makes me believe that this probably represents a different group altogether. When you make comparisons with Kenyanthropus to afarensis or the other species of hominid known from Ethiopia at the time, it is significantly different. So we named it a new species.
At three million years, we previously had one lineage; with Kenyanthropus platyops, now we have two - which basically shows that diversity extends much further back into the fossil record than was previously accepted. Around two million years you've got several different groups of hominid: homo; the robust Australopithecus; the more gracile Australopithecus; Homo habilis; and whatever Homo rudolfensis (or 1470) actually is.
That find hit the front pages of many a newspaper. So much for keeping a low profile - I was suddenly launched into this whole field. We decided, having worked up the west side of Lake Turkana, we would now move over to the east.
The fossil deposits from the east side of Lake Turkana are contained within a national park now - Sibiloi National Park - created in 1973 to safeguard these fossil exposures. Plumb in the middle you have a promontory called Koobi Fora, where the research camp was established in those early days. About 40 miles to the north of that are some of the rivers that we've been working more recently. That area of fossil deposits represents 1,600 square miles - a significant area of exposure to work through.
At Koobi Fora, you have the main base camp, the research camp. In the last two years we've managed to raise some money to put into infrastructure - a water desalination plant so that we don't have to drive 80 kilometers to get water from the nearest water hole; a power supply using solar panels and an inverter so we can actually run our computers and our fridges. It's a fairly civilized part of the world to work in - no hassles and traffic to deal with. Maybe you think that we have a pretty cushy life, but no - it's too far away from some of the fossil sites, so we put up these mobile camps along dry sand rivers closer to where the fossil sites actually are. It's quite chaotic getting a camp up - especially with 20 people who've never done it before; it took several days. But it's a very peaceful existence. We've got to find a little bit of shelter behind trees and things because there's a howling gale and lots of dust. The tent's usually shredded by the end of the season. We have a very simple kitchen - cooking food over a wood fire in the dark, often by torchlight. One of our kitchen people cut his hand quite badly, and I found myself with a friend stitching up his hand. We didn't have anything but two pairs of pliers and a funny needle, but we did the job, and that was 11 o'clock at night.
Water is a real issue for us up in the dry country. We have to collect water from the water holes in these dry riverbeds. If you're going to have it. Unfortunately we had some visitors who felt that clear water would be more appropriate. Some of the fossil hunting crew from the local area said, "We can get a root that will clear your water in no time at all." So they went and put this root in the water. There was never a camp with more bubbly bowel syndrome than that. We've since left that idea behind.
One of the challenges of this year was to recruit and train a new fossil hunting crew. I'm very much inclined to try and bring in some of the people from the park boundaries - the local people - and also some of the sons of the people who worked for my parents so there's some continuity. They're a great team, and if it wasn't for that team of people we would never find the fossils that we've been finding today.
We've also initiated a big GIS project where we can put the GPS fixes of fossils that we found in the field, download them directly into a computer, get a very detailed database and map and use this system to answer specific questions. New advances in technology that we're beginning to use in the field are going to help us tremendously.
So why have we gone back to Lake Turkana? Lake Turkana has deposits that range from four million years through to one million years, and Koobi Fora's particularly rich from the time around two million years. We have represented about two million years several different species of hominid: Homo ergaster or an African Homo erectus; what they call Homo rudolfensis; the robust Astralopithecus; and the gracile, what's been called Homo habilis. What are all these things, what were they doing and what do the limb bones of some of these specimens actually look like? If we can find some more complete skulls of these hominids, we're going to be able to answer some of those questions. The nice thing about Koobi Fora and East Turkana is that the finds we're making there are incredibly complete. Now that we're finding things just beginning to erode out from the surface, we've often got very beautiful and complete remains below.
We started out this year's field season going back to a site where, in the year 2000, a fossil tibia - the upper end of the lower leg bone - had been found on a small hill. That hill had been inhabited by a colony of rodents and the rodents had spent a lot of their time taking bits of this tibia to all different corners of this hillside down little burrows. We spent much of the first part of this field season trying to trace those burrows, and those burrows ended up in a series of holes which looked to me to be like termite holes. So we went on to have another look elsewhere. By this point the hominid team had got the hang of finding real hominids and not 600-year-old hominids, and we came up with a mandible. It wasn't a very pretty mandible, but we didn't want to put anyone off at this stage. It's still obviously got some uses and we put it in excavation to see if we could get any more of it - we always put in excavation when we find a fossil hominid.
Towards the end of the field season, we had recovered a fossil - a hominid humerus of a juvenile; an isolated molar; and a bit of mandible. Not much to talk about. There we were again, the last ten days of the field season, thinking, Wouldn't it be very nice if we could come up with some goods at this stage. The team at this point's getting quite tired and thinking about going home to their families.
One of the reasons we're working up at Ileret, to the northern end of the national park is because there are increasing numbers of people. There are increasing numbers of livestock because they are pastoralist and the livestock generally are walking across the fossil exposures and damaging a lot of the fossils that are lying out. Those hooves can do a tremendous amount of damage, and it's a marvel that what we found was as intact as it actually was - the base of a skull that was lying upside down in the sediment. We were very excited about this. I said to my mother, It's been fine all the way along, let's put some stones around it and we'll go and have lunch under the shady tree and come back and carry on digging it up. Sure enough, as soon as I said that, a herd of 80 cows appeared over the skyline, and we said, No, let's stay right here.
We spent a full day digging up this fossil. We started at seven in the morning, and we stopped about half past six in the evening. We still hadn't got it out of the ground, and so we wouldn't leave it alone at night, either, for fear that hyenas might come in - hyenas do, incidentally, love to chew up fossils, but only once we put this fossil hardener or a glue on them. I think they think it's got cow hoof in it or something. They'll come in, and if you leave a fossil that's been painted with this hardener overnight, by the morning it's not there. So we had a team of four guys stay out around the fossil and guard it overnight. Sure enough, they had hyenas all around them, and the next day we took this thing out. We all have very strong opinions, and right now until we find more of it next year, we really don't know quite what this is.
We then have to do a big sieve of the site. We put all the sediment through these screens and try and find little bits of bone to stick onto the original specimen. Then the sediment that's been through the screens has to be carried back to the comfortable camp by the lake and put through sieves again, but after it's been washed, so we then have to what we call "wet sieve" all the material. The recovery of a fossil hominid involves a huge amount of work and time.
But it's not only the fossil hominids that are important to us in that area. You can't really separate the fact that you have people in the north and on the edge of the park boundary that are obviously very, very important in terms of a long-term future and preservation of that area and the fossil sites. For us to successfully do the research up at Lake Turkana, we're going to have to increasingly involve people on the boundaries and make them understand the importance of that area.
We have a population at a small village called Ileret. There's some 3,000 people in this locality - they have no running water, no electricity; there's a health clinic there, but the health clinic has no medicines and no medical officer. It's really a very tragic situation. A lot of the time while we are running these research camps, we have people coming into the camp asking for help, and we run a small mobile clinic in the afternoons. We have huge incidences of malaria, brucellosis, TB and a lot of the fly-borne eye disease, trachoma, in which, if not treated - and it's very easy to treat with a simple antibiotic - these children lose their eyesight.
So that's part of the issue. Then, of course, we are in a national park, created to safeguard the fossil sites. In doing so, it preserves also a very important fish, turtle and crocodile breeding ground along the shores and restocks the lake. But Lake Turkana, unfortunately, is looped into a huge commercial fishing venture at the moment and boats with engines are going out and they're beginning to encroach on the park waters. Elsewhere you've long lines - kilometers long - taking out these huge Nile perch, which sometimes are several meters in length.
Crocodiles are getting caught up in the long lines as well. It's a very important lake in terms of crocodile breeding habitat. Big crocodiles come down from the Oma River. They're very impressive and they're going to be gone in the future unless we maintain this park. The park also contains large numbers of wildlife - or did contain large numbers of wildlife. You've got herds of tiang increasingly subjected to poaching pressure from livestock herders who are coming in armed into the park and killing wildlife for meat consumption. You can't blame people for doing this, but what you've got to do is to give something back - and that is becoming more and more my challenge. If I want to continue with the research work in the Turkana Basin, how am I going to ensure that we can safeguard this area in the long term and preserve these very important fossil sites?
It's up to me to create a system and provide some means to the local school, to provide a child an education, a future and an understanding of the importance of the fossils. He maybe one day will work with us in finding these things, and he won't just sit there and look at us and think, These crazy people, what are they doing?
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: What's the greatest misconception about our human ancestors that still seems prevalent?
A: That bipedality was a big leap forward. I don't think bipedality was such a significant leap. I think it's something that you would expect things to have evolved to be, if you were to stand upright and move up.
Q: How has your perspective of Homo sapiens changed through the years?
A: Homo sapiens evolved out of Homo erectus but probably in Africa - not in Eurasia or Europe. It was maybe not the first being to have speech. Homo erectus may have had qualities that Homo sapiens have today and maybe it wasn't such a marked change. It's very debatable, but I think if a hominid were to move that great a distance out of Africa, it must have been very intelligent and had quite complex communication.
Q: How does an understanding of our ancestors most impact the world today?
A: We're all innately interested in where we actually came from, and in a world today where there are so many issues and problems, why is it that we still want to know about our past? It really does still have a place in our quest for knowledge. We want to know what makes us human and why we do the things we do. It worries me to see the wars and things that we are faced with today, because I think humans as a species just maybe aren't quite smart enough to hold it together.
Q: Where do these fossils end up and to whom are they considered to belong?
A: They all end up in the Nairobi National Museum, which is the main repository for the fossils. All fossils found in Kenya are taken back to the museum in Nairobi, and they're kept there. Foreign scientists wishing to study them come to Kenya to work on them. They belong to Kenya; they're Kenyan national specimens.
Q: What makes Lake Turkana such a good place for finding fossils?
A: Lake Turkana is in a lake basin. We are in the Rift Valley, so you have highlands to the north and to the west and east from which rivers and runoff are carrying sediment fl owing down into the lake basin. Those rivers carry sediments, and along those rivers are forests and good habitats for animals - habitats where animals that died are then buried. Added to that, you've got a lot of movement in the rift, lots of tilting and faulting - fossils that are buried are then brought up to the surface, and because it's fairly arid, you've got a lot of erosion. So these fossils are exposed and people like ourselves can come along and find them. In addition, East Africa is fantastic in terms of its dating, because we've got a lot of volcanoes erupting. You can actually date the volcanic ash horizons and place these fossils above and below volcanic ash horizons.
Q: What is the earliest hominid that is known today?
A: The find that was recovered from Chad and was announced fairly recently. There has been a little bit of debate as to whether that is or isn't hominid - but I'm more than convinced that specimen actually is. This is what the science is all about - everybody having a good yell at each other until somebody goes and finds another thing to complement it. We just have to sit back and watch the whole thing unfold.
It's a terribly interesting specimen because it doesn't come from East Africa, it comes from further west, and it's got some very modern characters to it: big brow ridges and some features you'd associate with much later hominids. It raises the question as to whether hominids may not have been evolving elsewhere and may actually have walked into East Africa. We'll probably touch on some of these issues in the future when we find more material.
Q: Do you see the findings about early man having an impact on the environment of Africa or changes in attitude toward the environment?
A: I don't think so. I think it's going to be very hard for us to justify the preservation of these fossil sites. People pressure and socioeconomic issues are much more pressing. The fact that the fossil areas on the east side of Lake Turkana are preserved in a national park, which is now a World Heritage site, is one thing. And that may, in the long term, safeguard those sites. But outside of those protected areas, as for wildlife, it's going to be increasingly difficult to preserve in the long term.
|