"At the best of times, paleoanthropology, because it is such an interpretative science, leads to personal rivalries. Entire careers can hang on a discovery, reputations can be made or destroyed in the subsequent analyses, and funding more often than not follows personalities rather than institutions."
On the advice of two grand masters of paleoanthropology, Johanson and Richard Leakey, Berger decided that South Africa was the place to go to study the origins of humankind. It was a chance to work with actual fossils since both Ethiopia and Kenya were already bursting with paleontologists.
Berger describes his first meeting with the "king" of South African paleontology, Prof. emeritus Philip Valentine Tobias, who was in his 70s:
"He took me to the university's hominid fossil vault and produced a large skeleton key from his pocket... Behind this door lay not only the largest single collection of undescribed early hominid fossils in the world, but my future.
"Most of the fossils, the bulk of which came from Sterkfontein, were unknown to the broader scientific community... [for] a variety of reasons, including the academic boycott.
"... nearly 500 specimens were undescribed. At that time there were maybe 4,000 catalogued hominid specimens in all of the collections of both East and southern Africa."
As well as the autobiography of a modern paleoanthropologist, In the Footsteps of Eve details South Africa's part in the search for hominid origins. From the beginnings of paleoanthropology as a recognizable science with the description of the Taung skull by Professor Raymond Dart in 1924-5, to Berger's own discovereis and theories in the late 90s. Hominid finds in the rest of Africa, especially along the Great Rift Valley and in Ethiopia, are also described.
The chapter on fossil forensics is an enlightening read on scientific methods and analysis of hominid fossils -- describing the importance of the geological strata which surround the fossil and how the estimation of age is made more complicated than you may at first think. Just because it is found at a particular level doesn't necessarily give you the fossil's true age. These problems are all the more important for Berger's scientific stomping ground of South Africa -- he later describes the "tumble-drier nature of South African fossil formation".
Finally we reach the true reason for the book - Berger sets out his own interpretation of humankind's family tree. He takes us patiently, step-by-step, from the first flowering of his theories and his attempts to explain them to the scientific community. Berger describes the opposition he met from Tim White as if it were a part of the Spanish Inquisition. This form of investigation into a researcher's work is hardly unusual -- cross-examination by a panel of peers is standard practice in science and will be familiar to anyone who has defended a post-graduate dissertation. However, the tense atmosphere of a relatively new postgraduate suggesting heretical theories of hominid evolution to one of the grand masters of paleoanthropology is well presented (and Berger takes every opportunity to suggest that White has a vested interest in downplaying anything which contradicted his own work).
The field of paleoanthropology is described in this book as the playground of super-egos rather than a strict science and Berger, it appears, is well on his way to becoming another of these super-egos. The book tells an almost autobiographical tale of Berger's research, and presents a great deal of scientific information in a easily accessible format. It is a must for anyone who has the slightest interest in the hunt for humankind's origins.
The only drawback about this book is its reputation for typos and errors - the date for the delivery of the Taung skull to Professor Dart, for example, changes across the turn of a page (page 70-72) and the Indian Ocean is repositioned to the other side of the continent (p.276). For a National Geographic publication this is deplorable. However, it was promised that corrections would be made for subsequent reprints.
In the Footsteps of Eve by Lee R. Berger and Brett Hilton-Barber, is published by Adventure Press, National Geographic Society, 2000, ISBN 0-7922-7682-5, 325 pages.
