Читать книгу Exploiting Turkana - Jessica Hatcher - Страница 7

He died a sickly child aged 12-years-old

The human story began nearly 30m years ago. Africa was once relatively flat with a warm, humid climate that supported rainforest from east-to-west. But when the Indian and Asian continental plates clashed some 40 to 50 million years ago, it created the massive uplift of the Tibetan plateau. This forever changed weather patterns in East Africa, sucking in moist air from the region’s coastline, and making it progressively drier.

In a separate development, two tectonic plates that meet beneath Africa started moving in different directions, pulling the continental landmass apart. This rift created a deep, wide valley in the middle, the shoulders of which rose up and created de facto mountain ranges. Water ran off from the highlands down into the valley floor, creating great lakes, such as Turkana, while molten lava exploited weaknesses in the earth’s crust and volcanoes appeared. The new climate and topography dramatically altered the region’s biodiversity – rainforest was replaced by grassy plains, woodland, desert and highlands.

Turkana Boy, who was found on the floor of the rift valley in 1984, is the poster child for this titanic change on earth. His 1.6 metre (5ft 3in) frame graced the front covers of magazines, was subject to countless works of non-fiction, and still enjoys an illustrious modelling career in museums around the world – you can buy your own exact replica for £3,833 ($6,000) from the National Museums of Kenya. He died a sickly child aged 12-years-old – with a spinal deformity and an infection in his jaw.

After a three-hour drive on axle-breaking tracks, I come to a barely inhabited riverbank on the edge of Nariokotome village, five kilometres west of Lake Turkana. I am standing next to his grave.

The only people here, an elderly couple – Ekiru and Nakwaan Ngikomosoroko – show me around. For the early part of their lives, they were Turkana Boy’s unwitting custodians. They lived on top of his final resting place, keeping their goats in corrals made from thorny acacia branches. The goats’ skulls litter his empty grave, tokens of the ongoing drought. There is still a small open quarry just 10 metres wide, but nothing to mark the spot where Turkana Boy was found. The only ground cover is provided by thorn bushes, their tips singed the same orange hue as the curly hair of malnourished kids who skip through them. The sun desiccates almost everything it touches.

Ekiru and Nakwaan Ngikomosoroko make unlikely tour ­guides. They hoik and spit slugs of saliva that hit the ground with a thud, and are angry. The fossil hunters who came here in 1984 robbed them, they say – but to this day they don’t understand of what. A small, wiry man, Ekiru wears yellow beaded earrings, three aluminum ring­pulls on the fingers of his left hand, a purple shawl and a camo-­print sun hat.

Nakwaan wears hoops of beads in primary colours piled up around her elegant neck. Their house is a circular hut no more than three metres in diameter, made from doum palm reeds. It overlooks the dry bed of the Nariokotome river. On the rare occasion that rain clouds muster the strength, water flows from here into Lake Turkana, where gigantic crocodiles darken the shallows and flamingos pink the sky.

Thirty years ago, the promise of shade and water lured Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, then director of the National Museums of Kenya, and his team of fossil hunters to camp nearby while they explored west of the lake. On a typically hot day in late July, world-renowned Kenyan fossil hunter Kamoya Kimeu was taking a stroll when he happened upon the holy grail of fossil-hunting: what looked like a piece of early-human skull bone in the pebbly ground.

They suspected it would turn out to be an isolated piece, but in the coming weeks and months, their initial scepticism turned to ecstasy. They had discovered not just one, or even a handful, but 150 fragments of early human bone, with teeth to boot. It was a miracle that Turkana Boy’s skeleton survived. Our ancient ancestors didn’t bury their dead, and if they were not killed by a predator, a scavenger usually got to them before sediment could preserve the body. Scientists believe Turkana Boy fell into a swamp and floated face-down for a while, before being trampled by passing beasts, then embedded in mud where fossilisation preserved him.

Pictures from the excavation, which took place over a number of seasons, show a tanned and topless 39-year old Leakey in safari shorts sitting on the floor of the excavation site, head down in concentration. Today, his body is a scrapbook of the battles and triumphs of an extraordinary past – extraordinary enough to entice Angelia Jolie to direct a film, Africa, about his life. Penned by Eric Roth, the man who wrote Forest Gump, production is expected to start next year. By his early 20s, he was already on the way to discovering Koobi Fora on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana, the richest and most varied site for early-human remains in the world.

In 1968, he was appointed director of the National Museums of Kenya, a state institution that manages the country’s cultural assets and museums, a position formerly held by his father. In the late 90s, he became the director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, headhunted to stem the slaughter of African elephants. Leakey made many enemies in the course of his crackdown on ivory poaching. In 1993, when his Cessna 206 propeller plane lost power and crash-landed, many suspected sabotage, but it was never proven. He lost both his legs in the crash, and today walks on prosthetics.

A year after the crash, he left the wildlife service and entered politics, forming the opposition Safina Party. For this, he was flogged with a bull-whip in the street by hired thugs. In 1999, he was headhunted again, this time to be the head of Kenya’s Civil Service. He was diagnosed with terminal kidney disease in 1969 and given ten years to live. In 2013, two new kidneys later, he found his liver was failing and received a partial transplant from a close friend. Leakey says with pride that he had 14 willing liver donors in Kenya, while in the US patients usually struggle to find one.

In 2005, after leaving politics, Leakey founded the Turkana Basin Institute, a research institute that promotes new discoveries in the remote region. He now divides his time between conserving Africa’s natural and cultural heritage, and hatching a plan to see Turkana and its residents benefit from their resources. That includes both oil and fossils, so that Ekiru and Nakwaan’s descendants may one day speak of their home with pride.

Before Turkana Boy was found, artists’ renderings of early hominids were based on broken skulls, a few teeth, and the odd bone. “For professionals in the science, Turkana Boy really didn’t change one’s sense of an African origin,” Leakey says, recalling the impact of the discovery. “But for the non-scientist, to have a complete skeleton that you can look at and say, ‘That’s a human skeleton’, had a huge impact on swinging the willingness of people who weren’t really knowledgeable to say, ‘Yes, this is clearly a very long time ago’. If there’s a tooth, or mandible or broken skull, maybe. But a whole thing? That’s very convincing.”