In fairness, I must give credit for the dramatic find to a camel — a large ungainly beast who had already won my affection with his deep brown eyes. I called him George.
We had hoped to reach Kenya’s frontier with Ethiopia by dusk, Dr. Meave Epps and I, in our exploration last August of this vast, virtually trackless region east of Lake Rudolf. It was the second season of our survey to learn the nature and extent of the area’s fossil deposits.
Had we been traveling in the relative comfort of a Land-Rover, no doubt we would have dismissed a small rocky outcrop some two miles east of our course as not worth investigating. But we were already three days’ tiring march inland by camel from our base camp at Koobi Fora, on Lake Rudolf’s eastern shore, where we had left the rest of the expedition. George was complaining noisily; he had carried me far enough that day. And frankly, I welcomed relief from his jolting gait.
“Let’s have a look at that exposure and make camp,” I said. “Another day to the border won’t matter.” Meave, a zoologist on our expedition’s staff, offered no objection, nor did the other two members of our camel party, Nzube Mutwiwa and Kamoya Kimeu.
The grayish-brown ledge of sediments, sliced open by centuries of erosion, proved far more extensive than it had first appeared. As we approached it, Nzube and Kamoya circled out in one direction, Meave and I explored the other. Almost immediately we found fossils — heavy, bleached bones of ancient elephants, pigs, and other animals of the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene epochs, two to three million years old.
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