Bill Bryson's African Diary Read Free Page A

forty years to persuade them to return it.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “They coveted it,” she said, smiling serenely, but hinting at levels of darkness in the world of paleontology that I hadn’t known existed. “Now we don’t let anything leave the museum, ever. They are too delicate and too precious. If you want to see any of these special things, you must come to Nairobi.” How glad I was I had.
    The scarcity of human remains isn’t just because few bones become fossils, but also because precious few landscapes offer the right conditions to preserve fossils. The greatest of them is the Great Rift Valley, and it was there we headed next.
    I had always imagined the Rift Valley as some kind of canyon—a comparatively confined space where your voice would echo off walls of rock. In fact, it is a mighty plain, a hundred miles across and four thousand miles long. It is immense, and startlingly sumptuous in its beauty. As you head south and west out of Nairobi there comes a place where the ground just falls away and there spread out below you is the biggest open space you have ever seen: the Great Rift Valley. It is an amazing sight—a pale green vastness interrupted here and there by dead volcanic craters, but otherwise infinite and flat and very hot looking.
    We were headed for a place called Olorgesailie, 60 miles beyond the Ngong Hills on the valley floor. When we arrived, we stepped from the vehicle into a dry, oven-like heat, which was all the more startling after the comparative coolness of Nairobi. In 1919, a geologist named J.W. Gregory was poking around in the area when he came across an expanse of ancient and distinctive teardrop-shaped hand axes of a type known as Acheulean. In the 1940s, Louis Leakey and his wife, Mary, got around to excavating the site. What they found was that Olorgesailie was a kind of factory where these tools were made in incalculable numbers over about a million years, from 1.2 million to 200,000 years ago. But here’s the thing. The stones from which the axes were made aren’t found on the Rift Valley floor.
They had to be brought there from two nearby mountains named Ol Esakut and Mount Olorgesailie, each about ten kilometers away. Why the early people went to such trouble and what exactly they used the tools for have long been a mystery. Acheulean axes were beautiful pieces of technology for the time, and each represented a lot of effort to create, but they weren’t outstandingly good for cutting or chopping or scraping—certainly not a great deal better than almost any random unshaped rock would be.
    Yet for a million years early humans went to the considerable trouble of collecting and carrying large hunks of quartz and obsidian miles across a baking landscape to make them into axes at this one ten-acre site. More than this, the excavations showed that there was one area where axes were made and another where worn axes were brought to be re-sharpened. It was all amazingly organized.
    Today thousands upon thousands of these stone tools are heaped and scattered everywhere around Olorgesailie, left where they were dropped hundreds of thousands of years ago by ancestors so remote from us that they weren’t yet even Homo sapiens. It is an extraordinary site. One other curiosity is that no human remains have ever been found at Olorgesailie. We have to guess who the early people were.
    I know all this because a very bright and enthusiastic young man named Jillani Ngalla from the Kenyan National Museum conducted us around the site. Ngalla appeared to know everything there is to know about Olorgesailie, Acheulean tools, the Rift Valley, and early hominids, and yet he seemed awfully young for an authority. I asked him how long he had been a paleontologist.
    “Oh, I’m not,” he said cheerfully. “I am an aspiring paleontologist. I’ve been accepted at the University of Pretoria,” he added with a touch of pride, “but sadly I don’t have the necessary funds.”
    “How much