Obsessed with the tiniest bumps on ancient bones, and peeved at anyone who interprets those bumps differently, he’s ruthless in his quest to find new fossils, no matter what war zone or swarm of poisonous pests might be in the way.

He’s portrayed as a brilliant antihero, Indiana Jones meets Tony Soprano. This is the northern tip of the Great Rift Valley, a scar stretching southward through Kenya and Tanzania that has been dropping as Africa slowly rips apart, accumulating sediments and fossils across the time span of human evolution. For decades, these scientists have plucked petrified hominids from the Afar Depression, where the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden meet. The “us” in Pattison’s story is the American and Ethiopian team, led by Tim White of the University of California, that found the Ardipithecus skeleton. “In an ideal world, the task should be left to more dispassionate investigators but, since no other species has volunteered, the job is left to us imperfect humans.” “Something about the pursuit of our own origins arouses great passions not seen in other disciplines,” he writes, in one of the least passion-fueled statements in his riveting account of the discovery of Ardipithecus, a sometimes climbing, sometimes walking proto-human that lived 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia. Stay away from paleoanthropology, I was told as a young student smitten with fossils, and study less controversial stuff instead, like dinosaurs.Ī few pages into “Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind,” the journalist Kermit Pattison concurs.

We’re long past any serious debate that humanity evolved from apes in Africa a few million years ago, but the scientists looking for ever older bones of our ancestors always seem to be squabbling. THE SEDIMENTS OF TIME My Lifelong Search for the Past By Meave Leakey with Samira LeakeyĪmong the riot of species that have lived on Earth over the last four billion years, only we can ponder our own origins - and it often angers the blood. FOSSIL MEN The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind By Kermit Pattison

Fossil Men by Kermit Pattison