It is the ultimate mystery: where do we come from? Fossil Men tells the scientific detective story behind the discovery of the oldest skeleton in the human family. In 1994, an ancient trove of bones was unearthed in the Afar Depression, an Ethiopian desert of scorching heat, dangerous animals, and deadly tribal warfare. Nicknamed “Ardi,” the 4.4 million year-old female skeleton was more than one million years older than the famous Lucy found in the same valley two decades earlier.
This book tells the tale of the iconoclastic scientists who labored to decipher Ardi’s secrets. When finally reconstructed, she turned out to be a surprising combination of anatomy. She retained a grasping big toe for climbing trees, yet stood erect and offered the earliest glimpse of the uniquely human trait of walking on two feet. Ardi preserved body parts that had been missing from Lucy—including skull, hands, and feet— so the investigation became an odyssey through the natural history of the human body from head to toe. This book follows the investigators as they worked in secrecy and fended off scientific peers who impatiently demanded information about the skeleton purported to represent the roots of humanity. The journey stretched across two decades, four continents, and the entire timeline of human evolution from ape to modern Homo sapiens. Along the way, the Ardi team engaged with the central debates in the science of human origins—and repeatedly clashed with professional peers.
Behind Ardi stood an ensemble cast: Tim White, a combative Berkeley paleoanthropologist with a bloodhound nose for bones…Berhane Asfaw, who survived torture by Ethiopia’s former Marxist military regime and became his country’s first physical anthropologist…Owen Lovejoy, a former evangelical turned evolutionist…Gen Suwa, a Japanese polymath armed with powerful computers and an exacting mind for bones and teeth…Giday WoldeGabriel, an Ethiopian peasant who survived a boyhood of droughts, locusts, and bloody revolution and became a U.S. government scientist…and desert tribesmen who initially threatened the fossil hunters with guns but ultimately joined the quest for our shared ancestors.
When Ardi finally was unveiled to the world after a 15-year investigation, many peers found the skeleton and claims beyond belief. Most controversially, she suggested that modern apes are not reliable models for the human past and our real ancestors were unlike anything alive in the modern world. Ardi sparked more than a debate about old bones; she provoked a contest between rival paradigms for understanding our origins. The family skeleton ignited the ultimate battle of identity politics—the question of how we became human.
