Goodbye to Darkest Africa

The Lions lay around the Land Rover in the dawnlight, their bellies full of buffalo, a pride of 12 and two cubs playing in the bent tree that overhung the watercourse running fresh at the beginning of the long rains. The lions were the color of the Serengeti grass and the height of the grass at its fullest growth. Satiated by their morning feeding, they rested peacefully, but scars marked their sides and one of them, padding to another beat, favored a foreleg. The buffalo, massive and black and dangerous, they would have killed in any way they could, but smaller prey they killed by strangling, clamped their jaws onto windpipes and held them closed until all thrashing ceased. I stood in the back of the Land Rover looking down from above the sun roof, protected from the lions by their indifference to glass and aluminum alloy, staring into their yellow eyes. Sometimes, curious, they stared back. I had seen that stare before.

In Africa the human world began. Africa was therefore more than wilderness: Africa was wild, the place of emergence, the edge of the woods. Africa concealed the human past, the dark abattoir of human time and the deep abyss of human experience. Both coordinates, depth and darkness, I had come to Africa to explore. I suspected they were ordinate and abscissa measuring the impact of an apparition. I wanted to discover what manner of thing that apparition was.

Men approach Africa warily. Distant places may equate with states of mind. If they do, then Africa is libidinous, Darkest Africa, the source of primal energies that in other places emerge only attenuated or transformed. The landfall below the wing of the plane, the northwestern coast of Africa, strengthened that possibility: It was devoid of roads, marked only by the broad alluvial fans of muddy rivers. Two hundred million years ago, this primitive coast had fitted against the Atlantic coast of North America and the two continents--all the continents--were one. America had been a wildness identical to Africa's then, when man's ancient ancestors were animals no larger than squirrels. The two continents parted long before the age of mammals and most of the fauna aboard each were destined to develop along different lines.

One of those lines led to man. Man began in Africa black, foot-loose and free. It seemed remarkable that the continent had remained as primitive as the land below looked when its history of near-human and human habitation ran back 20,000,000 years. It should have been worn smooth as an old coin. Instead it was still largely untracked, still wild, had resisted civilizing through millennia.

The cool streets of Nairobi smelled of sweat and small high-compression engines and peanut oil. I pushed past crowds of Africans on holiday. They streamed to the finish line of the East African Safari, from which an announcer with a British accent blared the times and positions of the cars. The Africans ahead of me were obviously country boys. Nairobi on holiday, with its Europeans out in the suburbs, was a city of country boys who walked with the high-stepping lope of a man negotiating a plowed field and whose clothes were too small, clothes cut for croup-chested Indians that looked hand-me-down on muscular African frames. It was good to see country boys; I live in the country myself and hate cities, even East African cities, though their mixed crowds and curried air and miniature cars going the wrong way up and down the road give them more quality than most.

Wandering down Muindi Mbingu Street past the city market, I found myself in a district of African and Indian shops. I had strayed beyond the European section of town and within minutes I was joined by a young African who offered to guide me to the National Museum. I hadn't even known I was wandering that way: My instincts must have been working. I had already come 9000 miles, 18 hours on a Pan Am 707, to visit the National Museum--to see the new skull on display there, the new old skull. And by luck, this African student trained in English by a Peace Corps girl from California was eager to guide me to the door.

We passed Nairobi University and waited out a mist of rain, the student making conversation, then walked up the Uhuru highway lined with red-flowering trees and over the bridge that spanned the torrential, mud-red Nairobi River, and only when we came within a block of the museum itself did the student put the touch on me, pleading two parents murdered by Mau Mau and the necessity of assembling a $20 fee for the university entrance exam. I felt betrayed, having expected like all my fellow citizens to be admired for myself alone, but I'd enjoyed the conversation and the walk and I paid what I thought a tour would be worth and walked on.

The skull was discovered in the summer of 1972 near the eastern shore of Lake Rudolf in northwestern Kenya by an African named Bernard Ngeneo, who worked for Richard Leakey. Leakey was the director of the National Museum and one of three sons of the famous East African paleontologist Louis S. B. Leakey, who died last year at the age of 69. I had first heard of the Leakeys during my sophomore year in college, in 1957, when I had come across one of Louis Leakey's books and decided after reading it (and Robert Ruark's bloody novel of the Mau Mau uprising, Something of Value) that Kenya was the only place in the world for a young man to be. I wrote to the elder Leakey, asking for guidance and a job and in due time got back a characteristically frank reply to the effect that there weren't enough jobs in Kenya for Kenyans, much less for romantic American schoolboys. I stayed in school, but my curiosity about Africa increased in proportion to the possibility of satisfying it and now I was approaching the museum that the elder Leakey had directed and my wallet was five dollars lighter by courtesy of one of those very jobless Kenyans to whom Leakey had referred.

The fame of the Leakeys had grown in the years since my abortive correspondence. In 1959, Dr. Mary D. Leakey, a paleontologist as qualified as her husband, had found a shattered skull in Olduvai Gorge at the edge of the Serengeti plain in Tanzania, where she and her husband had been excavating off and on for 27 years, and the news of the discovery went round the world. The well-known anthropologist Ashley Montagu would later describe the discovery as "one of the most important--if not the most important--single contributions to the understanding of human origins ever made." Australopithecus boisei, the Olduvai skull is called today; Australopithecus means "southern ape"; boisei is a species designation in honor of an Englishman named Charles Boise, who supplied most of the financial support for the Leakeys' work at Olduvai until recently, when the National Geographic Society and other institutions joined in.

Australopithecines had already been found in South Africa; Robert Ardrey described their discovery and slow scientific acceptance in his best-selling book African Genesis. But they had been found in caves and quarries and could not be accurately dated. The Leakeys' skull was found undisturbed in datable layers of rock. A. boisei had a cranial capacity considerably less than modern man's--530 cubic centimeters, as compared with between 1000 and 2000 for Homo sapiens. It had a massive jaw and a crest on top of its skull like the ossified comb of a rooster that served to anchor the muscles of that jaw. But it was already launched down the road to Strauss waltzes and space platforms: It was found among stone tools, spheroids for bashing and hand tools for cutting and skinning. And tools meant culture, and culture meant man. The date came back from the laboratory: 1,750,000 years old. Louis and Mary Leakey had found man's immediate ancestor.

Or so scientists came to believe. In the United States, in England and in Africa, they devised a theory of hominid evolution that began with an upright ape called Ramapithecus that had a 300-c.c. brain and lived 15,000,000 years ago. Australopithecus, with the cranial capacities of various specimens ranging from 450 to 530 c.c.s, came next. And then, perhaps 1,000,000 years ago, perhaps less, came man, Homo. Brain size more than any other factor distinguished the genera; Homo erectus, the earliest of the known and generally accepted species of Homo, had a cranial capacity of 1200 c.c.s. The sudden expansion of the brain from Australopithecus to Homo fascinated the scientists and they sought a theory to explain it. The most popular of the theories they advanced proposed that the brain expanded when hunters needed more elaborate systems of organization and communication to take on big game. At that point, went the theory, selection favored bigger brains. So Ramapithecus begat Australopithecus, who begat Homo: That, greatly oversimplified, was the theory, and so it was written into the textbooks.

Richard Leakey's new skull, the one I had come to see, blew the books open again. KNM-ER 1470, as the skull was designated--1470 for short--had a brain capacity of 810 c.c.s. That put it well above the range of Australopithecus and only just below the lower limit of the range of modern man. Leakey published his tentative conclusions about 1470 in the April 13, 1973, issue of the British science journal Nature, conclusions so (continued on page 142)Darkest Africa(continued from page 122) understated that they almost seem tongue in cheek:

For the present, I propose that the specimens should be attributed to Homo sp. indet. [species indeterminate] rather than remain in total suspense. There does not seem to be any basis for attribution to Australopithecus and to consider a new genus would be, in my mind, both unnecessary and self-defeating in the endeavor to understand the origins of man.

Leakey chose not to emphasize, among his conclusions, the most striking fact of all about 1470: that it was 2,900,000 years old, contemporary with Australopithecus. The skull was the shock of the season. It removed the australopithecines from man's ancestry and made them appear to be a failed side branch of evolution. It weakened the theories of sudden brain expansion and thus the theories of man's origins as a "killer ape." And it pushed back the appearance of the genus Homo on earth by at least 2,000,000 years. Mr. Ngeneo and his director had reason to be proud.

Richard Leakey was a young lion among paleontologists, anyway, tall and self-educated and fierce and determined to make a name for himself and not yet 30 years old. He had come to the United States this past winter to lecture, an annual visit he made to raise funds for his digs, and I had chauffeured him around the country colleges of Kansas. He drew capacity crowds at every stop.

I wondered why. I had reluctantly joined the National Geographic Society in order to keep up with the latest discoveries around the world, so I knew that no mention of 1470 had appeared in the Geographic by the time Leakey came to Kansas. It wasn't 1470 that brought the crowds. I asked around. No one could quite say. Leakey's name. Africa. The origins of man. Those were clues enough. Africa was still a word for mystery, in Kansas and everywhere else Leakey spoke, and the hunger to hear about the place was a hunger, even a religious fervor, to know more about the remote childhood of the human race. The ancient connection between the African and the American continents still obtained, only rendered spiritual by the passage of time. Man's roots in Africa: Sighs of relief sounded all across the nation. The British had hoped so desperately to find early man in Great Britain that they had accepted for half a century the shabby hoax of Piltdown man. The Europeans so desperately wanted early man to be sophisticated and Continental that they denied Neanderthal man a place in their ancestry, though that place was beginning to be affirmed. Americans knew that man came late to their continent and did not evolve there, but if the honors couldn't go to North America, they certainly shouldn't go to Europe, smug old whore that she was. They might as well go to the only continent that could match the North American in brashness and rawness and in a spirit of freedom that seemed to come brawling out of the very soil, the only continent where the long march of civilization, as it was called, had never worn its deadening path, to Africa! I talked to Leakey about these notions as we drove the Kansas Turnpike and between his remarkable lectures, and though he agreed that people were ripe for new religions and might well be looking to paleontology to supply them, my notions cheered him not at all. Like Stephen Dedalus, he operates by silence, stealth and cunning, a young man in search of a place in history, as witness his understated conclusions about 1470 in Nature. He must have decided that day that he wanted no journalist from the interior of America to blow his cover, because though we had corresponded for a year about my coming to Africa to interview him for Playboy, he wrote to me a week later from New York, calling the interview off. He didn't, he said, think Playboy an appropriate vehicle for his work. Being an American, I was then more determined than ever to go to Africa, though I realized I would now be on my own. And standing outside the National Museum in Nairobi, Richard Leakey's museum now and the skull on display inside, I made another decision: that I didn't want to look at 1470 until I had seen East Africa. I wanted, before I met the relatives, to walk the family ground.

Outside Nairobi, driving northwest on the tarmac Limuru road past old Mercedes buses crowded with Africans heading into town, I breathed the smell of wood smoke from the passing settlements and wondered at the fog of the highlands. I had anticipated no such Africa, no emerald-green Africa of Sierra altitudes and Irish mist. The mist and the green made the red, volcanic African soil stand out all the more vividly. I tried to name the color. Mahogany was the closest I could come, a red-brown with a shadowy cast of black that rendered it sinister, as if it had been burnt, that gave it the timbre of what it was, minerals mined in violence from the sunless reaches below the crust of the earth.

If Africa had declared its independence from America millions of years ago, that rift was long buried under the widening Atlantic Ocean. But only a few miles from Limuru I could see the huge process of rifting still going on. The car, ably piloted by a Kikuyu driver named Peter Gitau, wheeled through a grove of trees and suddenly emerged on the escarpment of the Great Rift Valley that dropped precipitously away to a dusty floor 1500 feet below. It was the longest valley in the world, 4000 miles long, a place where two of the plates that form the hard outer shell of the earth were slowly pulling apart, which accounted for the size of the valley--of such valleys are oceans made--and its geologically recent volcanics. The Rift Valley had been created within the span of human time, if not of human memory: it began its division about 3,000,000 years ago, which meant its pyrotechnics terrified 1470's immediate ancestors. Peter descended into it gingerly, as if he were descending to a threshing floor.

I was bemused by the thought of wild animals and what they stood for. Why were people willing to spend thousands of dollars and travel halfway around the world to see the animals of Africa? Why did they join movements to save them from decline, when they and their forefathers had done precious little to preserve the animals of their own countries, animals such as the bison of North America? The day before, in a Nairobi bookshop, I had discovered a study of the subject by an ecologist named Alistair Graham, a book called The Gardeners of Eden, and had sat up half the night reading it. It was an eminently sensible confrontation of the game savers of the world, the people who decried the imminent extinction of the leopard and the cheetah (with little reliable evidence), the lovers of Elsa the Lioness and all those who believed that wild animals belong to the unborn children, a priceless heritage to be passed on unspoiled. "Compassion for animals," Graham wrote, "comes only from civilized men who have isolated themselves from all hostile influences of wild animals." Africans, by contrast, having to live with the dangers of night roaming lions and crop-destroying elephants, would be glad to see the animals exterminated. "Given the choice," Graham argued, "these people would unhesitatingly settle for the loss of the meat and poaching in favor of the opportunity to convert the land to human use. They would also be rid of one of Africa's most keenly felt reminders of a past barbarity--its wild animals." Of course Graham was not referring to the animals in the parks, which most Africans understood served as a valuable source of national income from tourism, but to the free roaming animals outside the parks, where Africans lived and farmed. And he was deliberately taking an extreme position in order to play devil's advocate to the wildlife movement and make it confront its irrational excesses, its unwillingness to consider game cropping, for example, despite the damage done in some parts of East Africa by game's uncontrolled increase, or its habit of dropping in with trucks and helicopters at great expense in a land of great human poverty to save rhino by moving them to areas already (continued on page 162)Darkest Africa(continued from page 142) occupied to the fullest by other rhino. The love of animals was selective among civilized people, Graham argued mischievously; it excluded mosquitoes and beef cattle and pets that misbehaved. And among game savers it was most conspicuously selective in countries such as those of East Africa, where human needs were obvious and extreme, where the choice ultimately was between free-roaming animals and men. The profligate love of animals, Graham concluded, was, in fact, a reaction formation that masked a considerable hatred of men.

Riding out in the Land Rover that afternoon to view game in the Masai Mara Game Reserve, I found it easy to agree. I had known the sickness myself. I had admired animals even in the days when I was butchering cattle for a living. "I claimed generally," Graham wrote in similar confession, "that animals were better than people. It never occurred to me to wonder what was the disappointment with people that made me turn to animals for sympathy." Exactly. Graham proposed no less for East Africa than that Homo sapiens should side first of all with Homo sapiens and confine the animals of Africa to its parks and reserves, proposals entirely realistic in countries with too little protein and increasing numbers of people to feed. Every square foot of ground that could be watered ought to be put to use growing grain.

And here were the animals before me, a herd of 100 or more black African buffalo and then small Thomson's gazelles, the "tommies" of Hemingway's stories, and giraffe and topi and occasional lone bull elephants that flapped their ears and trumpeted at the car. Zebras galloped past, plump and groomed as horses in fairy tales. The topi wore dark, shiny, mysterious patches on their thighs like patches of soot. The buffalo had horns on their heads that looked like the pulled-back hair of farm wives. The giraffe might have come from Mars, proportioned as they seemed to some different scheme of skeleton from other mammals. Before me on the grassy, rolling land studded with gall thornbushes was a vision of another time, for these animals were the surviving descendants of the distant age known as the Pleistocene, the age the daily press still calls the ice age, though many ice ages there were. The giants of the Pleistocene were gone, the pony-sized hyenas and the horse-sized sheep and the giraffe big as elephants, and only the elephant and the rhino among the largest animals still hung on in Africa long after their counterparts, the giant bears and mastodon, had disappeared everywhere else in the world. The African species running before me were animals of bold decoration, the kind of decoration found today only on birds and insects and racing cars and primitive men. And the Pleistocene produced all these remarkable species and that other species besides, man himself, and man or the effect of man's passage had eradicated most of the Pleistocene mammals everywhere but in Africa, and before long would reduce them to a manageable few even here, and in a world on the brink of dire overpopulation only sentimentalists would be sorry.

And yet. Sitting at the desk of an open steel-screened room at Keekorok Lodge in the Masai Mara at four in the morning, listening to the zebra crunching grass on the lawn and the black-faced vervet monkeys bickering in the trees, I wondered if the love of animals that some men and women felt didn't have distant roots, whatever its present maladaptation. Men had identified themselves with animals since the beginning of time, learning to imitate them not only in order to capture them for food but also because they contained within themselves, each species in its own unique way, a knowledge of the world that man coveted for his own. Man's world, until the most recent days, until only the last 10,000 years of a history that went back at least 3,000,000, had been a world where almost all the available knowledge resided in living things, not in gardens or laboratories or machines. "Primitive" men today, walking through the countryside, routinely knew the names and uses of hundreds of plants and animals and birds. The lion was a school for stalking, the termite for housebuilding, the wild dog for organized hunting, the tortoise for defense. Anthropologists were beginning to take such qualities seriously again, studying them for the analogies they offered to the habits of early men. It was possible that some of the ancient respect for the prowess of animals still obtained. Yet there were other reasons for the emotions animals stirred in the hearts of men besides the practical. I was traveling the land to find out what they were.

That was the morning when I had stood in the Land Rover among the pride of lions and felt the wildness of Africa as I had not felt it before, felt the gulf between men and animals. The lions paid little attention to the car, but there was reason to believe they had once paid attention to men. An anthropologist attempting to imitate the early hunters by living on the savanna had more than once chased lions off their kills with no more than shouts and waves of his hands. Men had shot lions on sight for so many years that only cowardly lions might be left, but it was more likely that lions were afraid of men. Other than elephants, all animals ran from men; killer ape or no, he was obviously the most skillful predator the world had ever known.

We crossed into Tanzania and entered the Serengeti National Park late in the morning and went through customs at Lobo Lodge, a striking new shelter built into a high knob of kopjes, huge boulders, that rose out of the plain 150 feet or more. Beyond Lobo Lodge a brown, blasted landscape studded with thorn seemed to stretch to the ends of the earth. If this was man's ancestral home, then no one need wonder at the race's hardiness; you could explain Nazi Germany with a landscape like this one. It was old, possibly several million years old in its present form, although it had seen interludes of greater rainfall than the rainfall of recent years. Yet its rigors didn't disturb the animals; tommies and zebra grazed contentedly on what looked like no grass at all, and farther down the road Peter stopped the car before one of the great spectacles of the Serengeti.

Before the car from horizon to horizon moved rank upon rank of wildebeest, black, bearded animals with long, mournful faces and high shoulders and sloping low backs that were, in fact, a species of antelope. They were cantering to new feeding and watering grounds in the northwest corner of the park, a column perhaps 12 wildebeest wide passing by a given point--the track on which the car was stopped--all day for days on end. There were nearly 1,000,000 wildebeest in the herd. So the American bison must have appeared to the first pioneers. I had heard of this migration in Nairobi from a wildlife specialist named Norman Myers, the author of a superb book on African wildlife, The Long African Day. Myers had thought I would find the wildebeest at George Dove's safari camp near Olduvai Gorge. A photographer had been making a film of the migration using a hot-air balloon for a camera platform. Obviously, the wildebeest had moved on.

As we drove toward Dove's, the Serengeti changed. From scrub and thornbush softened by the woodland along an occasional watercourse it went to grass and began to look like a prairie, an endless sweep of grasses and no trees or even bushes to break up the horizon. On this savanna, as prairies are called in Africa, the animals made their lives forever in the public eye, which meant most of all in the eyes of predators, lions, hyenas, leopards, cheetahs and wild dogs. The intended victims had acquired, as a result, every kind of exotic adaptation. The Thomson's gazelle had a black stripe running horizontally along its sides. The stripe made it stand out boldly from the buff grassy background, which hardly seemed protective, and yet it must have been.

Such markings began as random, accidental genetic changes that occurred in only one animal. Mutations of negative value quickly disappeared because they made their owners more vulnerable to (continued on page 232)Darkest Africa(continued from page 162) predation. Mutations of neutral value eventually disappeared because they didn't improve their owners' chances of survival beyond the average. But mutations that enhanced survival improved their owners' chances of reproducing. And since all tommies had horizontal stripes on their sides, the stripes must have enhanced and continued to enhance their chances of survival. The tommies ran by fits and starts, zigzagging and leaping into the air, and when they leaped into the air, the stripe tipped up and down in a way that distracted my attention from the outline of the animal and the direction of its movement. And if I was distracted, so would other predators be.

The zebra's dramatic markings, so bold and so uniform that they look to be the work of an avant-garde designer, also originated in random mutation, but I didn't understand their survival value until I found an explanation in a book by the animal behaviorist Jane van Lawick--Goodall. "We were again struck," she wrote in Innocent Killers, "by the effectiveness of the zebra's stripes as camouflage in the moonlight. On the open plains, in the daytime, the zebra stands out clearly, but at dawn and dusk, or when the moon is shining, he becomes almost invisible." The lion and the hyena hunt mostly at night.

All of which might be no more than earnest trivia except that I was approaching George Dove's, and beyond Dove's camp 20 miles or so was Olduvai Gorge, one of the world's two or three best sites for finding the fossil remains of early men, and if there was one thing that early men shared with the animals, one thing that differentiated early men from modern men, it was the fact that they adapted to the environment as animals still do, by changing themselves. That was why their brain size had increased. For all the advances of modern man, for all his technology and philosophy and art, the size of his brain hadn't changed in 1,000,000 years. It didn't need to. Instead of changing himself, man changed the world. By choice, not by random chance. To the extent that he was free enough from the mire of his own irrationality to make choices.

We turned off the main Serengeti track and drove through an open forest of thorn trees, the car lurching over pits and piles of dusty white rock, but the camp was worth it, a spacious lodge of rock and poles and thatch with a prefabricated water tower before it and a private house attached to one side and a row of tents running off to the west and a lake shining hospitably in the distance, Lake Lagaja, a soda lake that was the source of the water that carved Olduvai. George Dove came out to look us over and decided he approved and we were admitted for the night. He was an Englishman of considerable bulk with a full blond beard and waxed mustachios easily ten inches long that he moved around like range-finding antennae as he talked, sometimes pointing them out to the sides, sometimes straight ahead, sometimes up in the air alongside his ears. Dove had been in Africa 57 years, since he was four or five years old, and there was little he hadn't seen. He'd farmed on the Mau highlands in Kenya; he'd hunted with Hemingway (and thought him a better fisherman than a hunter, he said); he'd seen control of East Africa change hands from European to African; and now in middle age he had outlasted most of the others and become one of the last of his kind, the white-hunter kind. Meeting him was a privilege, as meeting Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith would be.

The hot-air balloon was gone and so was the wildebeest migration, but Dove described the passage of the animals through his camp. Guided by the old cows, who seem to remember the route from year to year (and wildebeest exude a wax from their hooves to mark their trails), the wildebeest migrate around and through Lake Lagaja, with a great loss of calves. This time, said Dove, at least 1500 calves had drowned in the lake's undrinkable water. He had every bloody vulture in East Africa out there and he spent days hauling the carcasses out of the water. The lions and hyenas went to work on the herd as it passed, too, and the lions got into killing frenzies, knocking down a wildebeest and not even feeding on it in their urge to knock down another. Dove's story indicated that the animals' mechanisms weren't up to the situation: The wildebeest, panicked by the lions and hyenas, started swimming and the calves started drowning; the predators, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of animals available to them, started killing and couldn't stop. They were like automatic machines that had gone out of whack and begun repeating the same programs over and over.

Dove lived among the wild beasts of the Serengeti and had come to think of them as his charges. The next day he went off to Seronera Lodge in the center of the park and cadged a huge bulldozer. In the early evening, as we sat over beer, we could hear the distant rumble of the big flat-bed truck bringing the bulldozer back across the track. Dove would put it to use enlarging a catch basin he had built, an artificial water hole that the Serengeti animals could use when their other sources of fresh water dried up.

And Dove had recently trained a mob of lions to hunt, a story he told with gusto. A scattering of half-starved young males had turned up at his front door one day. Dove brought in a tommy and stuffed the meat with antibiotics and fed the lions. In the process they got to know his voice and his car. None of them knew how to hunt and they had gotten together somehow in mutual incompetence. Dove taught them to follow his car by feeding them from it. When they were up to strength, he led them out to a herd of tommies, keeping the car between them and the gazelles, and then he gut-shot a tommy and moved the car out of the way. The lions sensed that something was wrong with the animal and bounded over and brought it down, looking, Dove said, like so many clumsy kittens. He kept up the hunting, and many repetitions later they had learned to stalk healthy tommies with the car as cover. Then he pulled the car out of the way for the last time and they hunted on their own. He expected to see them back when the long rains were over and drought once again concentrated the game.

Night and early morning were the best times at Dove's camp. The tents had window flaps that could be opened to the chill night air and the bright African moon and the metal cots were piled with blankets and in the distance the animals roamed the shore of the lake. I got up before dawn and went out. The grass was faintly touched with dew and the sky with light. Two hyenas loped along the lake shore; one saw me and turned and came my way and then must have taken my smell, because it turned and loped on with its partner. Its smell did not come to me nor did I hear it laugh, though the pair had made enough noise during the night tearing down a haunch of meat that Dove had hung in a tree near the lodge. The flat-topped thorn trees stood silhouetted against the reddening sky and the increasing light sculpted with shadow the chalk-white skull of an elephant that Dove had propped up on posts against a tree beside the lodge, the lodge closed up now with canvas flaps covering the breezeways of the porch outside the bar. On that glowing morning it seemed to me that the early men who lived here once long ago would have felt immense confidence as they woke to the Serengeti dawn, as much confidence as the lions felt that I had seen a few mornings before, the confidence all creatures feel that have mastered their work. So much of the lore of archaeology concerned man timorous before the powers of nature, yet the record and the evidence argued at least as convincingly for man bold. Richard Leakey had said as much in one of his Kansas lectures: The most numerous animal remains at Lake Rudolf were those of Australopithecus. And then I faced away from the lodge and toward the lake and watched the sun come up over a landscape that bore hardly a mark of civilization for a hundred miles.

Olduvai Gorge, in the heat of late morning, surprised me. 1 had expected to find it among hills, but in fact it was cut down below the flat surface of the Serengeti itself, lower than the level of the plain, so that it was almost invisible until the car came hard upon it. The guidebooks compared it to the Grand Canyon, but it compared to that mighty excavation as a tabletop model compares to the real thing--it was 25 miles long and several hundred feet wide, with a few isolated buttes that must once have been islands midstream rising up between the walls, for the gorge had been cut by a river that flowed from Lake Lagaja. Once the land that now was Olduvai Gorge had been covered with lava. Later it was the shore of a large lake. Later yet the lake partly drained and then completely drained and in geologically recent times the land had been as flat as the rest of die surrounding plain until the river cut the gorge and exposed the layers down to the lava again. The fossils began washing out of the walls then, carbonized to a slate gray that contrasted boldly with the buff of the lake sediment. In 1911, a German butterfly collector had found fossils at Olduvai and carted them back to Berlin, and it was at the Berlin Museum, after World War One, that young Louis Leakey of Kenya had first seen them. Back in Kenya in 1932, he mounted an expedition and began the work that was to consume his life and that still occupies Mary Leakey full time. In 1973, Olduvai was no longer the hot center of East African paleontology. Mary Leakey's son's team at Lake Rudolf had carried away that distinction by uncovering the remains of nearly 90 hominids there in the past five years. But Dove, for one, thought that the ultimate finds would be Mary Leakey's, though perhaps that was friendship speaking, and that Olduvai was where East African paleontology began.

Mary Leakey's workers were completing the excavation of an extraordinary new site. A young African guide named Abdullah took me to see it. The bones of a giant Pleistocene pig lay around two bowl-shaped depressions in the stone that once was mud. The depressions were the size of peck baskets and their sides were marked with gouges that might have been made by fingers scraping away the mud to shape the bowls. I put my fingers into the gouges and they fitted. Each bowl had a channel dug out leading into it from what had once been the lake shore. Abdullah had overheard Dove and Leakey speculating on the uses of the mud bowls and was convinced that the bowls, filled with salt water from the lake, served Australopithecus or Homo as dunking basins for their raw meat. Early hominids in Africa did not use fire, but every mammal in the world liked salt, salt water.

One of the basins was marked with a print, an inch deep at the edge of the bowl, that might have been the footprint of a five-year-old child. An adult's footprint had been found farther back in the same excavation. The prints evoked the scene: a family eating around its salt basins, a child playing in the mud, 2,000,000 years ago. The same sun, the same moon, the same Serengeti grass waving on the savanna beyond, but there was something different here from anything the world had ever seen before, human or near-human beings scraping away the mud to make the very ground a tool. Two footprints, two bowls, the bones of a pig: It seemed so little, and yet it might have been the campsite of Adam and Eve outside the Garden of Eden. Thus barely, when the world was already old and automatic, had we begun, and everything that worked for us, that made us what we are, was summed up in the imprint of that one playful foot.

Something like the Garden of Eden lay only 40 miles down the road hard by the Loolmalassin Mountains that rose out of the Serengeti and marked its eastern edge. We drove on from Olduvai and then began winding up into the foothills, each switchback opening a larger and larger view of the great plain below until it seemed that we could see halfway across Africa, the sky above us huge as space and the land stretching away green and brown and treeless to the horizon. Then the foothills closed us in and I could no longer see the Serengeti, but around us now reached green meadows thick with mountain grass and meadows golden with millions of wildflowers and wandering the meadows were the Masai, tending sleek herds of cattle. The air turned cool at 6000 feet and the Masai wrapped themselves close in their earth-colored cloaks and they stepped easily from the track as they heard the car approach without turning back to acknowledge it.

I sensed the change in landscape before I saw it, a sense of silence and emptiness even in the midst of the rain forest we were passing through, and then we cleared a hill and Ngorongoro Crater opened up before us. Ngorongoro was the collapsed caldera of an ancient volcano, a circular basin 12 miles wide and 2000 feet deep. The floor was covered with pale-green grass and marked with the dark lines of forest that indicated watercourses and near the center of the crater a lake glowed silver and gold and pink, the pink the reflection of vast flocks of flamingos that fed there through the day. Ngorongoro Crater took my breath away.

I checked into the new Ngorongoro Wildlife Lodge built into the rim of the crater and Peter located a ranger for a guide and we inched down Seneto Hill to the crater floor to make a quick circuit before dark. The wildebeest were beginning their rutting season and the bulls had spread out on the crater floor like pawns at mid-game, each occupying a territory of his own design and each attempting to defend his territory against all male intruders while keeping any cows that wandered onto it from wandering away. Bulls with larger territories, bulls more capable of discouraging the wanderlust of the cows they collected, were likely to breed more frequently than bulls of lesser ability, and thus territory served as a species-wide sweepstakes that ensured the strength of the race.

I saw, that afternoon, every kind of wild animal--wildebeest, zebra, Grant's and Thomson's gazelles, eland, lion, hyenas, rhino, hippo, jackals, elephant and waterbuck, wart hogs, giraffe, hartebeest, impala--as well as cranes, vultures, ostrich, flamingo and dozens of other kinds of birds. They lived in every habitat, lake shore and swamp, savanna and forest. They had become so accustomed to cars that they hardly moved aside for them; in that sense, the animals of Ngorongoro Crater were tame. Unlike the animals of the Serengeti, they did not migrate from place to place; somehow, long ago, they had found their way up the side of the mountain and down the steep rim into this paradise and long since had arranged their coexistence with one another, steadied their populations and settled down to feed in peace. If their lives were largely automatic, they were at least orderly; day-to-day nature was nothing if she was not orderly.

Back at the lodge as the sun set, I found a rare supply of Jack Daniel's at the bar and sat down to watch the clouds that hung all day on the rim of the crater, held back by the heat rising from the sunlit floor 2000 feet below, slowly roll in like ocean waves and seal the crater over until morning. It was like watching Eden being closed up for the night. Two villages of Masai live out their lives on the crater floor, and one white man presently lived there, in a cabin that the ranger had pointed out during the afternoon drive--Hugo van Lawick, Jane van Lawick--Goodall's husband, who was filming a television special on the crater's hyenas. The Van Lawick--Goodalls' work also began with Louis Leakey. He had believed that much could be learned about the habits of early man by studying the animals, and when Jane Goodall came to Kenya to work for him, he convinced her to go into comparative animal studies. She moved to the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania and began years of patient observation that culminated in her book In the Shadow of Man. She discovered that chimpanzees made and used tools, that they killed and ate meat on occasion, that they shared food--qualities that had never been attributed to them, qualities that had been reserved exclusively for man. The discoveries helped confirm man's origins in the natural world. They made it less likely that an astronaut or a monolith or a god had turned him on.

Hugo van Lawick came out to work with Goodall, photographing the chimpanzees, and eventually the two were married. Hugo learned the technique of observation and note-taking and was contributing his own studies of Serengeti animals as well as making remarkable documentary films for television. His film on the wild dogs of the Serengeti had won an Emmy in the spring of this year. And now while his wife taught at Stanford, he was working in Ngorongoro Crater filming the hyena clans there that she had previously studied.

I found him at his cabin in the crater the next morning still rocky from an early-morning bout of malaria. The cabin had walls of rough-cut planking and shelves filled with canned goods of several nationalities, and in the windows and at the ceiling buzzed the advance guard of an invasion of aggressive African bees. Hugo shot at them from time to time with an aerosol bomb, but I felt the hair rising on the back of my neck. Lions and poisonous snakes stir me only to alert respect, but insects terrify me and the interview was difficult to attend.

Hugo said that he and his wife were concerned with discovering the individual behavior of animals. Animals usually were studied collectively and some scientists still questioned the objectivity of their work and the validity of generalizing from one animal's idiosyncrasies to another's. But they made no attempt to generalize, he said, merely to describe accurately what they saw. It might be, for example, that only the Gombe Stream chimpanzees ate meat; certainly they were an example of a troop of chimpanzees in the beginning stages of meat eating, since they did it infrequently, in fads. But the behavior was no less intriguing, especially for the analogies it suggested to early man, who may also have turned to meat eating in just such haphazard fashion. It was popular for anthropologists to picture early man as a hunter, but it was just as likely, extrapolating from Jane's chimpanzee studies, that early man was a gatherer who occasionally, in passing, captured small animals and killed them. Chimpanzee life gave a very different picture of the possible life of early man than did the lurid theories of killer apes stalking the bush for prey. Yet when man did take up hunting, his behavior must have been, analogous in some ways to the hunting behavior of animals such as wild dogs and hyenas. The very fact that early Homo hunted big game was proof that the hunted in organized groups. Animals that hunt alone, such as leopards and cheetahs, hunt prey smaller than themselves.

Animal behavior was hedged with instinctive mechanisms and, in that sense, limited. Yet studies of individuality in animals such as those of the Van Lawick--Goodalls illuminated exactly that part of the human experience where the record was most obscure, the earliest years from which the only information to survive was the information contained in shattered bones and in a few stone tools. And work that connected man more firmly to his animal past decreased his sense of isolation. Chimpanzees shook hands, made tools, shared food: To know that much was to know that man did not differ from the animals as greatly as he had once thought but grew out of them as a plant grows out of the ground.

After the interview I rode with Hugo in his camera-rigged Land Rover to see the hyenas lying in mud puddles panting out the heat of the day. They looked domestic, the Terrible Twins having weaning tantrums, a young hyena poking its nose from a den to sniff the air blowing past the car, but I remembered Hugo's photographs of the hyena clans hunting at night, tearing apart a wildebeest, eating it alive. Such was domesticity in the wilds. Then Hugo dropped me back at the cabin and Peter and I drove to Loitokitok Springs in the crater and ate lunch fighting off the swooping African kites. And I decided I was ready to look at 1470 and that day we left for Nairobi, past Lake Manyara, where the lions sleep in the trees, through Arusha, where Peter changed a tire and I watched the May Day parade, and on the tarmac road past Kilimanjaro blanketed with mist.

Leakey had caused a white case to be built for the skull with portholes for viewing. It rested in its case as carefully protected as the moon rocks I had once seen at the Smithsonian, but it radiated an aura more intense than any of those: It was the oldest human skull yet recovered from the mass grave of the earth. Its eye sockets were large and widely spaced and deep. Its lower jaw was missing, as were most of the connections between the cheekbones and the palate. Its teeth were missing, though the hollows where their long roots had been left tracks in the bone. Its cranium, egg-shaped, lacked the prominent brow ridges of the australopithecines. Small, brownish, its bone fragments set into blue plasticine filler, it looked like a savage mask. It stared from its white case into a dimly lit, pleasantly musty 20th Century museum, marking not only a stage in the evolution of man but also a milestone in the intensifying effort to comprehend and document that evolution.

Paleontology had been a castoff science for 200 years, victim of the disgust men felt at being compared to the animals and the hope men held out that mankind was the product of God's special creation. It was coming into its own, but it was a poor fledgling science still, with little in the way of solid theoretical structure to build on, so that the chance discovery of 1470 had been enough to upset the basic sequence of hominid evolution presented as fact in three of the major textbooks of the field. Until recently, there had been little money to spend and few people--and rarely first-rate people; there weren't 20 of those in the field right now--willing to undergo the rigors of the work. And yet it had excited the popular imagination, over the years, far more than many other sciences of greater repute.

I thought I knew why. The churches were emptying out, country by country and year by year. They emptied because they were intellectually bankrupt. Mystery remained, extraordinary mystery, but it had little to do with the myths and rituals of traditional religion. At least, more and more people felt that way, which was why they crowded the lecture halls to hear men like Richard Leakey speak. However careful the conclusions such men drew from evidence, to their audiences they seemed to be offering a new religion, built on the solidest structures of the modern world, on the rigorous logic of science. Science enacted its miracles here on earth in plain view of the crowd. The skull came from a datable layer of rock; human fingernails scraped the basins out.

Christianity gave men the Creation and the Fall; the Leakeys and their colleagues gave men a more complicated origin but one no less profound, no less a pilgrim's progress: a lemurlike creature taking to the trees and evolving binocular vision to see its way across open spaces and small perfect hands to cling to branches. The earliest apelike beings swinging down to hang below the tree limbs, occupying that new niche where the fruit grew, their arms lengthening and their chests flattening to accommodate the new swinging way of movement, their legs hanging down, preadapting them to upright locomotion. Their descendants standing more or less upright and living on the ground, moving out of the forest by day and returning to it for safety at night. The violence of rending continents dominating the eons of man's birth. Life by lake shores with birds and fish and small mammals to eat, 1470 coexisting with the australopithecines as the chimpanzees today coexist with the baboons. The stifling permanence of those early years, nothing changing for 50 or 100 generations, the same camps, the same food, the same meager tools, the same meager words, the only change the slow pressure of evolution reshaping the body itself and, most of all, the brain. And then, in the past 1,000,000 years or less, all the changes accelerating, men moving out of Africa to Asia and the Middle East and Europe, hunting larger and larger animals with increasingly sophisticated weapons and tools, learning to use fire, inventing ceremony to bury the dead, inventing art and worship, inventing humanity, which resides, when all is said and done, not in the shape of the skull but in the forms of the imagination.

That was the picture paleontology painted of the origins of man, and it was every bit as stirring as the Bible's pictures or the Koran's, but I wondered if those who were ready to accept the scientific vision of the evolution of man were ready to accept it all. Anthropologists who wrote about man's evolution always stressed the changes that resulted from environmental pressure. Hunting required communication; therefore, men evolved larger brains. Such arguments implied, however unintentionally, that man designed himself. But the basic mechanism of evolution was not selection but random mutation. The lions the color and height of the Serengeti grass, the moon-striped zebra, the Thomson's gazelle and Australopithecus and 1470 were all products of chance, of accident. Mutation occurred when a genetic sequence was copied wrong within the cell, and such miscopies took place entirely at random. If they increased the organism's opportunities to reproduce, then they werepassed on to its offspring. If they didn't, then they died out. The living world, every virus, every cell, every plant and animal and bird, consisted of nothing more--and nothing less--than the results of this random, accidental process. It was a process, as one scientist had phrased it, that was totally blind. It knew no purpose at all; it could lead to anything. It had led to ears keener than any microphone, eyes keener than any photocell, brains more subtle than any computer; it had also led to the extinction of most of the species that had ever lived. And it had led to man, not through divine creation but through the blind operation of blind chance, through a series of purposeless accidents as ephemeral as the accidental passage of a cosmic ray through the heart of a cell.

That, the origin of man in the wallow of evolution, the accident of man's beginning, was the apparition I had come to Africa to search for and found staring out at me from the empty sockets of an ancient skull. Yet now, having seen a glimpse of Africa, I felt no terror. Seen as accident, Africa was the more dazzling: the tommy leaping into the air, the hippo blowing water, the black rhino turning to confront the car before clanking slowly away, the two Masai boys sitting naked in a puddle by the side of the road, the child's footprint by the basin that time had turned to stone, the young hyenas in a weaning tantrum, the two black-maned lions lying beside the shards of a zebra while the vultures and the marabou storks skulked a safe distance away, the Africans in cities and on wood-smoke sweetened farms: Only so enormous and so enormously minute a mechanism as accident could account for such splendor, because only accident could generate the infinite range of possibilities such splendor required.

Nor was man any longer entirely the creature of chance. Less than 1,000,000 years ago, in the long hours of leisure left over from a life of hunting, he began to play at being human, inventing language, inventing myth, moving from the dream-time to the light of day. Migrating to colder climates, he forestalled the evolution of body hair by inventing clothing and taming fire; seeking larger game, he forestalled the evolution of claws or canines by organizing hunting parties with spears. Cultural evolution thus overrode physical evolution by the revolutionary process of shorting out the environmental feedback that physical evolution depends on for direction. Thus man partly freed himself, wrested a certain freedom of choice. It was a change in the world second only to that primal freeing of matter, the accidental creation of life itself.

No wonder that man looked back upon his remote ancestors with an awe tinged with pity, knowing that they must have lived much as the other animals in Africa lived and live. No wonder that some people looked upon the animals with nostalgia that sometimes obscured their duty to the impoverished of their own species, for it was from the body and blood of the animals far more certainly than from the body and blood of any human savior that man took his freedom from the mire. Out of random, out of accident came a degree of freedom from random and accident: That was the paradox of human evolution.

Goodbye to Darkest Africa, I thought then; that enormous continent, still hardly marked by any roads, was proving the very source of human enlightenment. One day, after the final fading of the civilization of the West, Africa would dominate the world. It had done so once before, 3,000,000 years ago, when it shuddered and the grass bent beside a lake and man came forth entire.