Modern Mind

included sections on the cheetah, leopard, wild dogs, and hyenas, took up where the Adamsons left off, in that Schaller was much more systematic and scientific in his approach – he counted the number of lions, the times of the day they hunted, the number of times they copulated, and the number of trees they marked out as their territory. 17 While this did not make his book an enthralling read, his overall picture of the delicate balance in Africa between predator and prey had a marked effect on the ecological movement. He showed that far from harming other wildlife (as was then thought), predators were actually good influences, weeding out the weaker vessels among their prey, keeping the herds healthy and alert. He also made the point that although lions were not as close to man as chimpanzees or gorillas were in phylogenetic terms, they were quite close in ecological terms to, say,
Australopithecus.
He argued that lions’ hunting techniques were far more likely to resemble early man’s, and his own studies, he said, showed that lions could hunt efficiently in prides without any sophisticated vocalisation or language. He did not therefore think that language in man necessarily evolved to cope with hunting, as other scholars believed. 18
    The final study in this great scientific safari on the Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda border was Ian Douglas-Hamilton’s investigation of elephants. A student of Nikolaas Tinbergen at Oxford, Douglas-Hamilton had originally wanted to study lions but was told that George Schaller had got there first. Douglas-Hamilton’s study, published as
Among the Elephants
in 1975, was a cross between the Adamson-Goodall-Fossey approach and Schaller’s more distanced research, mainly because elephants are far harder to habituate to in the wild. 19 He observed that elephants keep to family and kinship units and appear to show affection to other family members, which extends to a characteristic trunk-to-mouth gesture. Although he would never have been so anthropomorphic as to say this was ‘kissing,’ it is hard to know how else to describe it. Several family units make up kinship units. At times of abundant food supply, after the rains, elephants come together in massive 200-strong herds, whereas in drought they break up into smaller family groupings. Elephants show an extraordinaryamount of interest in dead elephants – offspring will remain alongside the body of a dead mother for days, and a herd will sometimes dismember the carcass of an erstwhile colleague. Douglas-Hamilton’s research meticulously catalogued which elephant stood next to which, and showed that there were clearly long-term ‘friendships.’ 20 As with the other big mammals of Africa, Douglas-Hamilton observed great individuality among elephants.
    Much farther north than Olduvai, but still part of the Rift, the great valley splits into two: one part of the Y extends northeast into the Gulf of Aden, whereas the other heads northwest along the Red Sea. The area between the two arms of the Y is known as the Afar Triangle and is part of Ethiopia.
    To begin with, the sites in Afar had been excavated by the Leakeys, especially Louis’s son, Richard. They had dug there by invitation of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was himself interested in the origins of humankind and, on a state visit to Kenya in 1966, had met Louis Leakey and encouraged him to come north. Early digs consolidated the picture emerging farther south but were overshallowed by a discovery made by a rival French-American team. The guiding spirit of this team was Maurice Taieb, a geologist, who made the Afar Triangle his speciality (it was geologically unique). He called in a palaeontologist he had met elsewhere in Ethiopia, Don Johanson, a graduate student at Chicago University. Taieb had found an area, named Hadar, which he regarded as very fruitful – it was several thousand square kilometres in size and very rich in fossils. An expedition society was formed, which initially had the Leakeys as members. What happened on that expedition, and subsequently, became one of the most controversial incidents in palaeontology.
    In November 1974, four miles from his camp, Johanson spotted a fragment of an arm bone sticking out of a slope. At first he thought it belonged to a monkey, but ‘it lacked the monkey’s distinguishing bony flange.’ 21 His eye fell on another bony fragment higher up the slope – then a lower jaw, ribs, some vertebrae. He had in fact found the most