The Tree Where Man Was Born (15 page)

Many wildebeest, streaming toward the highlands, cross the south end of Lake Lagarja, the headwaters of the Olduvai stream that cut the famous gorge; like almost all lakes of this volcanic region, it is a shallow magadi or soda lake of natron—native sodium carbonate in solution. In the low woods by the
donga that drains the plateau to the west, a family of five cheetah lived that winter in the airy shadow of umbrella thorn, and greater and lesser flamingos, drawn to the soda lake’s rich algal broth, rose in pink waves between the dark files of animals crossing the water. Since gnu are ever willing to stampede, the crossing is a hazard for the calves, and one morning of early winter more than six hundred drowned. Death passed among them like a windstorm, and its wake was awesome, yet the carcasses littered along the lake shore were but a third of one per cent of this antelope’s annual regeneration in the Serengeti. Bloated calves had been dragged ashore by lions and hyenas, and others floated, snagged on mud reefs in the foamy shallows. In the thick heat of central Africa a stench so terrible clings to the throat; death had settled in the windless air like a foul mist. Among the carcasses, probing and sweeping, stepped elegant avocets and stilts, ignoring the taint in the stained water, and vulture and marabou in thousands had cleared the skies to accumulate at the feast. These legions of great greedy-beaked birds could soon drive off any intruder, but they are satisfied to squabble filthily among themselves; the vulture worms its long naked neck deep into the putrescence, and comes up, dripping, to drive off its kin with awful hisses. The marabou stork, waiting its turn, sulks to one side, the great black teardrop of its back the very essence of morbidity distilled. With George Schaller of the Serengeti Research Institute I made a count of the dead calves, and the vultures gave ground unwillingly, moving sideways. Vultures run like gimpy thieves, making off over the ground in cantering hops, half-turned, with a cringing air, as if clutching something shameful to the stiff stale feathers of their breast. The marabou, with its raw skull and pallid legs, is more ill-favored still: it takes to the air with a hollow wing thrash, like a blowing shroud, and a horrid hollow clacking of the great bill that can punch through tough hide and lay open carcasses that resist the hooks of the hunched vultures. Vultures fly with a more pounding beat, and the cacophony of both, departing carrion, is an ancient sound of Africa, and an inspiring reminder of mortality.

Dr. Schaller, a lean, intent young man whose work on the mountain gorilla had already made his reputation, was studying the carnivores of the Serengeti. In the winter of 1969, he spent as much time as possible in the field, and often he was kind enough to take me with him. Usually we were underway before the light, when small nocturnal animals were still abroad—the springhares, like enormous gerbils, and the small cats and genets. The eyes of nocturnal animals have a topetum membrane that reflects ambient light, and in the headlights of the Land Rover the eyes of the topi were an eerie silver, and lion eyes were red or green or white, depending on the angle of the light. The night gaze of most animals is red, like a coal-red beacon that we once saw high in the branches of a fever tree over the Seronera River; the single cinder, shooting an impossible distance from one branch to another, was the eye of the lesser gallego, or bushbaby, a primitive small primate which may or may not resemble the arboreal creature from which mankind evolved.

In a silver dawn giraffes swayed in the feathery limbs of tall acacias, and a file of wart hog trotted away into the early shadows. Where a fork of the river crossed the road, a yellow reedbuck and a waterbuck stood juxtaposed. With its white rump and coarse gray hair, the waterbuck looks like a deer, but deer do not occur in Africa south of the Sahara; like the wildebeest, gazelles, and other deer-like ruminants, from the tiny dik-dik to the great cowlike eland, the reedbuck and waterbuck are antelope, bearing not antlers but hollow horns: the family name, Antilopinae, means “bright-eyed.” All antelope share the long ears, large nostrils, and protruding eyes that together with speed help protect them against predators, but non-migratory species such as topi, waterbuck, and kongoni seem more vigilant than the herd species of the green plain.
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At Naabi Hill, the wildebeest were moving east after the rains. In their search for new growth, wildebeest are often seen trooping steadfastly over arid country toward distant thunderstorms, which bring a flush of green to the parched landscapes.
Some two hundred thousand were in sight at once, with myriad zebra and the small Thomson’s gazelle. Eight wild dogs were hunting new gazelle left hidden by their mothers in the tussocks; one snatched a calf out of the grass only yards from the tires of the Land Rover, and with the two nearest dogs tore it to bits. The death of new calves is quick; they are rended and gone. But one calf older than the rest sprang away before the dog and made a brave run across the plain in stiff-legged long bounces, known as “pronking,” in which all four hooves strike the ground at once. Like the electric flickering of the flank stripe, pronking is thought to be a signal of alarm. Though its endurance was astonishing, it lasted so long because most of the dogs were gorged and failed to cooperate. While the lead dog snapped vainly at the flying heels, the rest loitered and gamboled, picking up another calf that one of them ran over in the grass.

The Land Rover, dodging humps and burrows, followed the chase across the plain. Schaller clocked the young gazelle, which dodged back and forth for two and a half miles on the car’s gauge and more than three in actuality; it never ran in a straight line. (The zigzag is less an evasion tactic than a way of seeing out of eyes set back on the sides of the head; in a herd, pursued animals usually run straight out.) The calf’s spirit tempted us to intervene but we did not, since it was doomed whatever happened; separated from its milk when the chase began, it would have gone hungry while awaiting the first of the many beasts and giant birds that would come for it on sight. Finally, two dogs moved up to flank the leader, and in moments, the chase was over. The calf, still bouncing desperately, veered back and forth across the paths of the spurting dogs, and the dog to the eastward snatched it from the air; the other two were on it as it struck the ground.

One day, by a depression that holds water in the rains, I found a chipped flake of obsidian, much used by primitive man for his edged tools. There is no obsidian on the plain; the chip had been brought here long before. I wondered about the men who
brought it—what size and color were they? Were they in hides or naked? What cries did they utter? Staring at the sun, the sky, were they aware of their own being, and if so, what did they think?

Doubtless the primitive hominids whose remains have been found at Olduvai were drawn to the edge of the great plain by the legions of grazing animals, and doubtless they were glad of a bit of carrion. The hunter Frederick Selous, in the 1870s, was appalled to see natives eat meat of an elephant eight days dead—“Truly some tribes of Kafirs and Bushmen are fouler feeders than either vultures or hyenas”
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—but accounts of life on rafts and in prison camps, in plague and famine, make clear that the most civilized man will eat both carrion and his own kind when survival is at stake, as it must have been each day for low-browed figures who lacked true weapons and perhaps language, despite the physical capacity to speak. (Perhaps the earliest
Homo sapiens
of the Old Stone Age had no fire, and the gift of flame from the supreme Creator, recognized by almost all African tribes, was an earthshaking event that is still remembered in the myths.)
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Traditional theories of the social life of earliest man are based on the behavior of non-human primates, although the apes are essentially vegetarians, and have lived very differently from man for more than a million years. Social systems, which often differ greatly among closely related creatures, tend to evolve in response to ecological conditions, and George Schaller felt that much might be guessed about early man from a comparative study of the social carnivores,
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which also pursued game in open country. While unable to run down his prey in the way of the wild dog or hyena, or even rush it swiftly as the lion does, man would have used such lion tactics as driving, ambush, and encirclement, and come upwind to the quarry, as lions have never learned to do. And as with the carnivores, a successful kill would inevitably depend on the social group that would share the food.

To judge from remains of predators found at his sites, early man was an increasingly effective creature who drove such unaggressive
daylight hunters as the cheetah and the wild dog from their kills. In the dark, he was at a disadvantage and took shelter, leaving the hunt to leopard, lion, and hyena, but in the day, confronted with his sticks and stones, strange upright stance, and the shrieks, scowls, and manic jumps of primate threat display, these more dignified creatures probably gave way.

To learn how hunter-scavengers might fare, we sometimes walked some fifty yards apart for two hours or more over the plain. On most of the hunts gazelle calves were plentiful—with throwing sticks, four or five could have been killed, and with bolus stones (found at Olduvai) still more—and it was almost always possible to locate food by watching vultures in the distance. One day we came upon a Thomson’s gazelle, dead of disease, that the carrion-eaters had not yet located, and also a young Grant’s gazelle that must have been taken by the two huge lappet-faced vultures that we drove away, for the kill was fresh and no predators were anywhere about. Another day, when Schaller was elsewhere, I saw from a distance the white belly of a female Thomson’s gazelle, fresh dead. As I approached, the first vulture, a big lappet-face, came careening in and took a swipe at her white flank. The vulture was instantly driven off by a second female gazelle; the great bird, flop-winged, chased its assailant but did not renew its assault on the dead animal.

The gazelle was still warm, and I slit open the belly to see if she had died in calving. She had milk but no calf; the wet newborn thing crouched in the grass some twenty yards away. A half hour later, her companion was still on guard, but more vultures were gathering, and finally the body was abandoned to a motley horde of griffons, white-backs, and hooded vultures that stripped it to the bones in a few minutes.

Jackals, vultures, and hyenas are alert for the defenseless moment when a new calf is born; often hyenas will attend the birth. But one day there was a mass calving of wildebeest in a shallow valley like an amphitheater between the isles of rocks, and it may or may not be significant—I simply record it—that the calving took place in the very middle of the day, when the
sun was high and hot and the plain still. There was no predator in sight for miles around, nor a single vulture in the sky. Cow wildebeest were down all over the place, and a number of tottery calves less than an hour old swayed and collapsed and climbed again to their new feet. By late afternoon, when the predators become restless, raising their heads out of the grass to sniff the wind, these calves would already be running. (Wildebeest calves can usually run within ten minutes of their birth, but even this may be too slow; I have seen a lioness, still matted red from a feed elsewhere and too full to eat, walk up and swat a newborn to the ground without bothering to charge, and lie down on it without biting.)

For fear of scattering the cows, I restrained a desire to go close, for the calves will imprint on the nearest moving thing and are not to be deterred. One day, I was followed from a grazing herd by a young calf, and my efforts to lead it back to safety finally resulted in putting the herd to flight. The calf did not follow, and the herd forsook it; nor would it permit itself to be caught. Finally I too left it behind. A mile away I could still see it—I can still see it to this day—a thin still thing come to a halt at last on the silent plain.