Adventures in the Bone Trade: the race to discover human ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression by Jon Kalb Copernicus Books (an imprint of Springer-Verlag), New York: © 2001

About the Book:

from the Copernicus Books site "In the last few hundred years, Africa has witnessed the slave trade, the ivory trade, the diamond trade, and the rubber trade, each representing a separate chapter of discovery and exploitation. In the 1920s, another type of "trade" burst onto the stage with the discovery of our oldest human ancestors, beginning with the Taung Child, Australopithecus africanus, found in South Africa in 1924. Then came the sensational discoveries in East Africa made by Louis and Mary Leakey in the 1950s and 1960s, and by their son in the late 1960s. Their discoveries produced unprecedented scientific "wealth" about our origins and instantly captured the public's attention.	Although trafficking in humans and extracting minerals can hardly be equated with the pursuit of human origins, their respective quests have followed a similar trajectory: exploration, discovery, territorial competition, and personal gain. When the search for fossil hominids shifted to the Horn of Africa in the 1970s -- specifically, the Afar Depression of Ethiopia -- the stream of fossil and artifact discoveries that followed produced the longest and most complete single record of human fossil or artifact remains in the world. This book takes us behind the scenes of the explorations in this unique desert area, focusing especially on the 1970s, when the valley was first mapped and many fossils and archaeological sites were discovered, but continuing to the present.	As co-founder of the expedition that discovered Lucy and leader of most of the first site-surveys in the Afar, Jon E. Kalb has years of experience with the region, its politics, and the scientists involved in the excavations. A participant himself in the "bone wars" that accompanied these discoveries, Kalb recounts the cut-throat competition and back stabbing that often were part of the media-highlighted race to find the oldest hominid fossil. He weaves this story in the rich fabric of Ethiopian society and politics, including the overthrow of Haile Sellassie (whose neighbor he was for a time), the brutal dictatorship that followed, the plight of the region's peoples, and the international maneuverings for control of the fossil finds."