I rode into the field with two dozen scientists and students and six armed guards. Our caravan of 11 vehicles carried enough food and equipment for six weeks. As we threaded through the highlands, sharply terraced fields of sorghum and corn gave way to misted forests. Th e road was littered with the flotsam of mere history—around a bend the burned hulk of an army armored personnel carrier from the civil war in the 1990s and, farther on, the eroded name MUSSOLINI carved in the lintel above a tunnel, a legacy of the Italian occupation of the country in the 1930s.From the top of the escarpment we switchbacked down a gargantuan staircase formed as the Arabian continental plate pulled away from Africa beginning some 30 to 25 million years ago, dropping the Afar Basin ever deeper into the rain shadow of the highlands. As we descended, the vegetation grew thinner, the sun more intense. A few hundred yards above the basin floor, we pulled over. Below us the western hills in the foreground fell toward a ragged, fault-scarred plain. On the horizon to the southeast, beyond the green ribbon of the Awash River, the highlands seemed to merge with the cone of the young volcano Ayelu. Below Ayelu was a sliver of silver: Yardi Lake.Two days later we were walking along its shore—White, Asfaw, and WoldeGabriel, along with two longtime members of the project, geologist Bill Hart of Miami University in Ohio and Ahamed Elema, the leader of the Bouri-Modaitu Afar clan For a while we followed the lake margin, bright dragonflies flitting about our ankles It was the perfect setting for making fossils, now as in the past Animals come to eat, to drink, to kill and be killed Bones get buried, rescued from decomposition Over eons, water trickles minerals in, organics out White—58 years old, hard and thin as a jackal—poked with his long-handled ice ax at things newly dead A catfish skeleton left by a fish eagle beneath an acacia tree The head of a cow, still wearing a leathery mask of dried flesh If you want to become a fossil, he said, you can’t do much better than this.
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