Feature: Fronties Beneath the Earth

FRONTIERS BENEATH THE EARTH: GREAT ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS

MSU's own 'Indiana Jones' describes the major discoveries in archaeology and explains how they help us discover who we are. I am an archaeologist and have dug in the remote Lake Turkana region of northwestern Kenya and, most recently, in the Kalahari desert of Botswana in southern Africa. I have lived in exotic settings and seen my share of cobras and scorpions, including some in my tent, but that is where any connection with Hollywood's 'Indiana Jones' ends! I don't carry a whip or seek rich golden tombs. Instead, I try to discover how ordinary people lived long ago by means of careful, controlled excavations.

What I do is important to all of us because it teaches us where we came from and helps us to understand who we are. Archaeology is the main tool to find out about how we lived before there were written records. The ability to reach out and touch the past and come closer to our ancestors is truly exciting. Archaeology's success was made possible by many early pioneers in the 'golden age' of discoveries who weathered adventures that would have challenged Indiana Jones himself.

Austin Layard, who is credited with the discovery of the biblical city of Nineveh, Iraq, was held at knife point and was nearly killed by bandits on several occasions. Another intrepid adventurer, Edward Thompson, dove into the murky waters of the Well of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza in Yucatan with primitive diving gear in a search of treasure. Thompson was once trapped at another site in a small space with a large coiled rattlesnake. These and other stories are featured in my book, Stones, Bones and Ancient Cities, which recounts the exciting history of great archaeological discoveries and the search for human origins. Here are some notable ones.

Search for the Missing Link In 1871 Charles Darwin proposed, in a heretical statement at that time, that humans were descended from apes. Furthermore, he also claimed that fossils would eventually be found in Africa that would connect humans with their ape ancestors. This set the stage for a search for what has often been dubbed the 'missing link.' This quest would lead scientists on a trail that would take them from the forests of Indonesia, to the edge of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa and eventually to the Great Rift Valley of East Africa.

The initial discoveries of fossils of human ancestors were certainly needle-in-haystack propositions, in which no one even knew where the haystack was. One of the early pioneers who took on this challenge was Eugene Dubois, who enlisted in the Dutch Army in order to go to the Far East where he believed the elusive fossil ancestor would be found. In what was a nearly impossible feat, given the absence of any real clues, he actually unearthed the remains of 'Java Man,' a fossil skull and some other bones, which are now recognized by the scientific name of Homo erectus. The discovery created such a controversy about whether the bones belonged to a human or an ape that Dubois eventually hid them below the floor of his house and refused to let anyone see them for many years.

The first major breakthrough in Africa occurred in northern South Africa when fossils encrusted in a dolomite (limestone) matrix were blasted from a quarry known as Taung. The lumps of rocks were brought to Raymond Dart, in Johannesburg, who patiently chipped away at the stone surrounding the fossils. After several months of work he uncovered the skull of a child, which, much to his amazement, revealed both human and ape-like characteristics. Dart named the famous Taung child Australopithecus africanus, or Southern Ape of Africa. Although the discovery was initially very controversial, it was one of the most important fossil finds ever made, because it confirmed Darwin's claims and really focused the search on Africa. The history of what followed is a highly interesting and detailed story centering on other sites in South Africa and the work of the Leakey's and others in East Africa.

Sites such as Olduvai Gorge, Lake Turkana and Hadar have yielded an abundance of fossil evidence of our early ancestors who walked upright on the African plains about two million years ago. In one case, their footprints, along with those of birds, insects and other animals, are remarkably well preserved in the ancient volcanic ash layers found at the edge of the Serengeti plain in northern Tanzania. (For MSU Alumni who would like to see some unusual sites, a visit to northern Tanzania can combine a tour of Olduvai Gorge along with views of Mount Kilamanjaro and the herds of big game animals on the Serengeti and in Ngorongoro crater.)

ICE AGE ARTISTS

I am especially fascinated with the study of the origins of art, because for the first time in the long record of cultural development we can see how people actually visualized animals such as extinct woolly mammoths. The revelation that Stone Age people painted beautiful pictures of extinct animals on the walls of caves during the Ice Age was another great breakthrough in the history of archaeological discoveries. It began quite by accident in northern Spain, when a hunter's dog disappeared into a hole in the ground, which had penetrated the collapsed entrance of an ancient cave. In 1879, the landowner, Marcelina de Sautuola, opened up the mouth of the cave and began to excavate stone tools and animal bones from the floor. Meanwhile, his daughter, Maria, explored part of the interior and suddenly shouted 'Toros pintados!'

In the flickering torch light of the cave she had found a whole series of paintings of extinct bison on the ceiling. Nevertheless, Marie's discovery was rejected by scientists as a fraud for the next 20 years despite the compelling evidence provided by de Sautuola. In fact, the beautiful art of Altamira was only accepted after other sites were found in France.

One of the other key sites was revealed when a man had penetrated a buried cave while digging a root cellar. The cave contained engravings of extinct animals that had been partially covered by cave deposits. There was no way that this new site could have been faked. Since then, hundreds of other cave paintings have been found and we can see such animals as wild cattle, horse, bison and mammoths painted in great detail (some of these sites can be seen by tourists).

While it may seem like the age of great discoveries of cave art sites is over, this is not the case. A recent New York Times article featured the discovery of Cosquer cave found by a scuba diver over 110 feet below the present sea level of the Mediterranean in southern France. The diver, Henri Cosquer, subsequently swam into the main corridor of the cave for a distance of over 500 feet. This 'Indiana Jones' adventure revealed that the sloping corridor of the cave eventually reached a chamber that was above the water level. Further exploration revealed that the walls contained Ice Age cave paintings rivaling some of those found at Lascaux, a famous French site, now closed to the public. One unique find was a picture of a penguin. Archaeologists had already found fossil penguin bones at other sites dating to the Ice Age, but the picture was another first. How did Ice Age peoples originally penetrate Cosquer Cave without scuba gear? It is well known that world sea levels were much lower during the height of the Ice Age when much of the water was essentially 'locked up' in massive glacial ice sheets. Many areas, including Europe, had greatly extended coast lines at that time, and paleolithic peoples could have easily walked into Cosquer Cave. In fact, there is another underwater cave art site in France, known as Montespan, which was discovered many years before scuba was invented.