Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Before we talk about your five books, can you tell me a bit about your work in Africa?
I started to work there in the 1970s and I have been working in different African countries ever since, from South Africa all the way up East Africa and then on into Jordan, largely in the Great Rift Valley that runs right through the eastern side of Africa. And for the last 30 years we have concentrated our efforts in Ethiopia, in a particular part known as the Afar Triangle. This is where the famous “Lucy” skeleton was found in the 1970s. Then in the 1990s our team was successful in finding a fossil skeleton over a million years older than Lucy that has taken us into uncharted territory in a temporal sense.
And this is the oldest skeleton ever found.
That is right; she is called “Ardi”. And finding that came in little bits at a time. We started with an Ethiopian student who was here at Berkeley named Yohannes Haile-Selassie (no relation to the emperor). He was a trained osteologist and he first recognised a piece of the palm. And as we started to collect other bones from the surface right in that area we began to appreciate that some of these bones were still embedded in the ancient sediment. And so over the next three years we excavated the skeleton piece by piece and put it back together again.
It was a very large study because we tried to understand that entire world that Ardipithecus inhabited, in addition to Ardipithecus herself, as represented by the skeleton. And since this period was completely unknown in Africa we were in uncharted territory.
It must have been very exciting trying to put together this 3-D picture.
Exactly – it was of an ecology that has now disappeared because this area is a very remote, lowland desert today.
Why do you think it is so important to find out about prehistoric men and women? How can it help us?
Well, simply to contextualise our place in nature. This is something that is of universal interest. Every culture studied by anthropologists has its own mythology of how people came about. These range from Australian aboriginal accounts to people in the Arctic, to people in the Middle East. The differences among these different myths are very great, of course, because they are all just myth. If we really want to find out where we came from, there is only one way that we can do that, and that is through the science of palaeontology. And so that is why we go out and try to get the evidence and pull that evidence together to understand what truly happened in our history and prehistory.
Let’s look at some of your book choices, which are linked to that. Your first book is Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, which is the diary he kept of his extraordinary voyage.
In this book Darwin is writing as a much younger man than we meet later as a result of his great scientific achievements. But this was really the beginning of those achievements, as he was on this small wooden boat circumnavigating the planet and experiencing all the different cultures and all the different scientific data that were really new in those days. In South America he saw animals that science was only beginning to learn about.
This was on the Galapagos Islands.
Yes – there he recognised this great variety of clearly related forms, and, in the years that followed, he worked out how these species had arisen. His Voyage of the Beagle outlines that, and it is a great history book. It is also a great adventure book as well, as he witnesses volcanoes and earthquakes and different cultures and describes all of this in that mid-1800s terminology. Darwin is a great writer and an excellent observer so it is a good place to start understanding where we came from, and how we came to that understanding.
Is this what sparked off his interest in being a naturalist?
Yes, indeed. His father thought that it would be good for him to get into medicine and so forth. Actually, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prominent British physician. In fact, he was an evolutionist, so evolutionary thinking was already in the family. And it was also very widespread in Darwin’s day. The problem was explaining it, and that is the problem that Darwin solved. His solution to that problem really began during this voyage of the Beagle, when he was exposed to the tremendous variety in the tree of life. He was beginning to grapple with this question of how do we explain this tremendous diversity in life itself, and what is our part in all of that?
Your next choice is a natural progression. This is Charles Darwin’s more controversial book, On the Origin of Species.
This is a classic in science. It is the explanation for how we got here. In other words why evolution occurs. And it is an interesting title because it is On the Origin of Species. Many people mistakenly think it is “The Origin of the Species”. But, in fact, Darwin says virtually nothing about human evolution until the very end of this book. And even then he only says, “Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” That is it – then he drops the topic, saving it for a later book.
But, of course, the scientific public and the general public immediately got the implications in 1859. What he had done was to provide an explanation for how evolution occurred, and this was natural selection. This was Darwin’s great insight and what that did was to provide the explanation of how and why all of life was linked together. It wasn’t until 1871 that Darwin published his book on human evolution. But even in 1871 there still was virtually no fossil evidence for human evolution. That’s where we now differ so much from the state of affairs in the 1870s. Now we have a tremendous amount of paleontological data about how we evolved.
Tim White is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most famous for his work on early hominids in Africa, particularly the skeleton nicknamed “Ardi”, the oldest hominid skeleton ever found
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Transcript of letter from Emma Darwin to her husband Charles querying effects of his theory of evolution. Sent in 1839 but recently published online. An extraordinary piece of writing, made more remarkable by Darwin's own footnote
"If big brains are so useful, then why are they relatively rare?" Fascinating tour of the scientific research that addresses this complex question and reveals how human biology had to reorganise itself to cope with larger brains
On evolution and the collective nature of human knowledge. Suggests that story of human origins is "a little more complex and multi-layered that one East African tribe of African Eve exploding outward from its ancestral territory"
In-depth interview with Jane Goodall, anthropologist. Touches wide range of issues but most importantly: "How come the most intellectual being, as far as we know, to ever have walked on this planet is destroying its only home?"
