Elite Traveler March-April 2016

95 elite traveler MAR/APR 2016

excavated. Soon we are eagerly hunting for fossils ourselves. We find fragments of fossilized turtle shell, a crocodile vertebrae, fish bones and arrowheads. "It is painstaking work,” Dr Leakey warns, but to discover the skull or jaw of a human ancestor that has lain unseen for a million years is “incredibly exciting, a moment you will always treasure”. Back at the field center Dr Leakey introduces us to Dr Sonia Harmand , a French archeologist from Stony Brook University in New York. In 2011 she found the oldest stone tools in the world when she and her paleontologist husband, Jason Lewis, got lost in the Turkana Basin. Dr Harmand places some of them on the table. They look like ordinary rocks until she points to the fracture marks where our distant ancestors chipped off sharp edged flakes. That was a turning point, her husband explains. With those flakes hominins could cut meat off carcasses killed by other carnivores. Suddenly they had a ready supply of meat. They grew bigger and stronger and came to dominate other animals. “Since I was 18, I always wanted to find the world’s oldest stone tools, and I did it,” Dr Harmand says proudly. “It was like a dream.” Dr Leakey shows us some skulls of our forebears and how dramatically they have evolved. She shows us how TBI workers clean and piece together tiny fragments of priceless fossils. Towards evening she leads us down to the Turkwel River which, being the rainy season, has water in it. We cool off with cocktails on a sandbank in the middle, then head back to the field center for a dinner of fresh tilapia from the lake. There is no air conditioning, so we sleep outside on a veranda beneath mosquito nets, and wake to a gorgeous dawn. Somehow people eke a living from this land. They live in thatched mud huts and own practically nothing except goats. By the lake, men of the Turkana, Dassenech and El Molo tribes fish for tilapia, tiger fish and Nile perch. The women – festooned in layers of colored beads – then gut, salt and dry the fish, some using sharp stones to remove the innards much as Dr Harmand’s hominins probably did. The tribespeople seem almost closer to those distant forebears than they do to us with our iPads, laptops and GoPro cameras, not to mention the helicopter. Dr Leakey recalls the utter bemusement of some tribal elders when she used a drone to photograph fossil beds so she could put the pictures online for everyone to view. But she warns us against arrogance and complacency. To demonstrate the fragility of our existence she invokes a toilet paper roll with 400 sheets of paper. The first sheet represents earth’s formation. Dinosaurs appear 19 sheets in and vanish five sheets from the end. The first apes appear on the last half of the final sheet. Homo sapiens, in existence for a mere 200,000 years, appears on the edge of that final sheet. We're already sowing the seeds of our own extinction, Dr Leakey contends. In the 80 years since her grandparents started searching for the origins of man, the global population has soared from two to seven billion. We are destroying the environment to sustain ourselves, and even in the Turkana Basin the consequences are apparent everywhere. The wildlife has largely been killed. Overgrazing has turned the land to desert. Overfishing has depleted the lake. Ethiopia has just completed a huge new dam on the Omo River which provides 90 percent of the lake’s water, threatening to turn it into a toxic dust bowl. “Here in the so-called ‘Birthplace of Humanity’, you can already see how humanity is destroying itself,” says Dr Leakey. Homo sapiens could well be extinct within a few hundred years and “the planet would be a better place without us”. Martin traveled with The Safari Collection . From $56,750 for a five day privately guided tour for four. Includes all internal flights, helicopter transfers to Solio with Air Kenya, helicopter flight north to Turkana with Tropic Air, two nights at the Turkana Basin Institute, one night in Nairobi's Giraffe Manor and one night in the Solio, Sasaab game lodges, plus a $3,750 donation per person to the Turkana Basin Institute. +254 731 914 732, thesafaricollection.com

A local worker painstakingly cleans sandstone from a fossil

“You can already see how humanity is destroying itself. The planet would be a better place without us”

Photos: Lorna Buchanan-Jardin courtesy of The Safari Collection, Martin Fletcher