Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Read Free Page B

might be otherwise. Some years later I caught a graduate student falsifying field notes in primate research in Africa. After I found he could not have been in the field, given his receipts and gasoline mileage, I fired him and sent him home. He said to me ruefully as I handed him his airline ticket: “YouVe always had a penchant for investigation.”
    At the time, however, I was miserable. I told Margaret that I wanted to go back to the ivory tower, back to the university. I wanted to get away from all the endless strife, controversy and dishonesty of the insurance business. I wrote my old teacher, Tom McKern, and asked if he thought I had the potential to become a forensic anthropologist, to make a career of it.
    McKern wrote back and said, in essence: “Come.” I went. In short order I earned my master’s degree, put together my thesis on Caddoan Indian skeletons and had someone turn it in for me. By the time I learned I had won my master’s degree, I was in Kenya, trapping baboons as part of a research project. I was an anthropologist, twenty-four years old.
    No primate makes a good pet. That includes humans. We and our cousins—the gorillas, the chimpanzees, the monkeys, including the baboons—are a rather uncivilized lot, fiercely proud and independent, but at the same time treacherous, greedy, aggressive and cruel. I carry a deep scar on my right arm, where an old baboon bit me, lacerating my ulnar artery and coming very near to costing me a limb. I hold no grudge. It was a fair fight. In the eyes of the baboon I was certainly in the wrong. I had jabbed him with a tranquilizer in an effort to capture him alive in Kenya, to ship him to a research laboratory in America. In his position, I would have tried to kill me too.
    My days in Africa marked me far more deeply than this hollow old wound in my arm shows. I caught malaria twice. I had to face down angry Masai tribesmen carrying spears. Wobble-kneed and drunk on pure adrenaline, I confronted charging Cape buffalo bent on trampling me to muddy paste, and shot them seconds before their horns got intimately acquainted with my chest. For sheer terror I recommend the Cape buffalo; no departmental chairperson or budget committee can begin to compare with this shaggy mass of bone, muscle and rage.
    Kenya is forever glorious in my memory. In those magical times, thirty years ago, my wife and I were still discovering each other, truly building something together, amid the most exotic and beautiful surroundings imaginable. Both of our daughters were born in Nairobi.
    My years in Kenya confirmed me in the path I had chosen. Africa poured forth gifts that I have always treasured, made me a better teacher, gave me a perspective that broadened and deepened my research. There is no greater living laboratory for anthropology on earth than the immensity of Africa, with its startling displays of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” yet profoundly beautiful for all their savagery. What had been theoretical in my mind suddenly came to life before my eyes. I keep an articulated baboon skeleton on a shelf in my office, and it brings back memories of the Kenya and Tanzania I knew then: Kimana, where Hemingway camped and gazed at Kilimanjaro’s snows; the blue Chyulu Hills, the Tsavo National Park, Lake Manyara where the lions lie lazily up in the trees, paws dangling from limbs; the magnificent Serengeti Plain, Lake Magadi, Lake Natron, the Ngurumani Escarpment.
    I have tried to incorporate scenes from Africa into my lectures on anthropology and I think it has made them more interesting and down-to-earth. I can tell my students with eyewitness certainty that a lion will eat this but not that. I can set them straight about baboons, which are described in many textbooks as strict vegetarians, but which I have seen with my own eyes devouring hunks of freshly slaughtered baby antelope, chickens and other birds. Such lessons can’t be learned in books. Africa tided me over during some very