The First Human

"Yes, there is an interesting story to that. Ann is the correspondent for Science magazine who covers this field, so she is extremely knowledgeable and very much up to date. She has been to all of these sites and she approached me many years ago, a few years before this book got published. She said, “I am going to do this book. I want to go to the field, I want to get the story of Ardipithecus ,” and I said, “Well, we haven’t published the science, and the reason we haven’t published it is because we are not finished doing it – we are still engaged in fieldwork – so can you wait?” And she couldn’t because this was a topic that was hot. Exactly, and in those days this was the first time anyone had ever had a look beyond Lucy into this four-million-year stretch. We were exploring the unknown, so people were very anxious to get the information. And we were very anxious to get the information right and sometimes science goes more slowly than you would hope. It took a long time to put this skeleton back together again and preserve the bones and contextualise and understand this ancient discovery. She forged ahead and she covered not only our work but the work of many other people. So this gives the reader the most up-to-date knowledge of how modern paleoanthropology is done. And it gives you a sense of the personalities involved and the breadth of science and so forth. The problem is that a few years after it was published we came out with the rest of our results, so it became somewhat out of date. But she does know that, and we are looking forward to a second edition. Absolutely, and there still is. It turns out that just about everyone is interested in this particular subject. My colleagues describe me as too meticulous and too mercurial! But I think passionate is a better word to describe me. I love this work. I don’t like the genre of tell-all politics of paleoanthropology books, and there are a great number of those. I think Ann did a good job of steering clear of those as much as she could and instead she really got into the science. My Ethiopian colleague Dr Berhane Asfaw is currently working on a book that will tell the stories of our team’s discoveries from a more personal point of view as an Ethiopian scientist. We prefer to leave all the politics to the side and do the science, which is more interesting."