Lives in Ruins (6 page)

In his office, all manner of weapons, blades, triangular points, and axes were arrayed on his desk, windowsill, and bookshelves, mementoes from his digs or the products of his skill as a flintknapper who fashions his own stone tools. Shea is a paleoanthropologist and lithics specialist who studies ancient humans and their tools. A boyish forty-nine when we met in late 2011, Shea had spent his childhood in the woods in Massachusetts, behind his working-class family's home, and in northern Maine near his Acadian grandmother's. “They all knew I was going to be an archaeologist when I was, like, seven or eight,” he said. “I was digging holes in the backyard, making primitive tools. The Last Child in the Woods, that's me. I was snowbound one winter in the late sixties, and the Time/Life book about prehistory came just before the snowfall did, and here it is—pictures about how these early humans are making the tools and different kinds of points—and I thought, ‘Gee, that would be fun.'” Good raw material for flintknapping, quartzite or basalt, was hard to come by in Shea's neighborhood, but glass was plentiful at the town dump, where he worked in college. “Dump keeper, the perfect job for an archaeologist,” he said. Once he discovered that the bottoms of cheap wine bottles yielded the best material, he began knapping wine bottles. “You can make big arrowheads out of those,” he said.

“For me, archaeology is basically a part of natural history, and stone tools are a connection between humans and how they dealt with their environment. So, they're tools; they're a means to an end. I look at an artifact like this—” He held up a hefty old ax blade, a big bearded man lifting a weapon in a darkening office, and I held my breath. “My colleagues will say it's a type three Maya classic ax.” That was fine as a label, and an expert could explain how the type three differed from the type two or one, but Shea's experience as a flintknapper made him look at it as something more,
a unique artifact with a particular history. “I can see the scars. I can see this fracture pattern. [Its makers] probably broke it when they were resharpening it. It's like, I look at a stone tool just like you would look at a text in your book.”

When Shea talked about the early humans who have been in the news recently—the
Homo erectus
skulls discovered in faraway Georgia, or the tiny
Homo floresiensis
(nicknamed “the hobbit”) unearthed in Indonesia, or the little finger bone used to identify a branch of
Homo sapiens
called Denisovans—he was not talking about remote ancestors whose lives interested him only as archaeological subjects. He identified with them. He, too, built fires, made string, tracked animals (though he doesn't hunt; “I think hunting for sport is cruel”), spent hours chipping stone and making points. How could you understand early humans if you didn't try to experience how they lived?

Stone tools pried open Shea's career. His practical experience with them earned him a spot on an excavation in Belize, where a graduate student digging nearby offered to introduce him to the famous South African archaeologist Glynn Isaac, who had just been hired at Harvard. “They'll let anybody in,” the student told him. Harvard's graduate school had already rejected Shea, but Isaac met him and asked about his tools. Shea reached into his loaded backpack and began pulling out points and blades, and Isaac arranged a full scholarship to Harvard for him. Shea has since been on excavations across the world as the stone tool expert—“I'm the Forrest Gump of archaeology,” he says. He has worked in Europe and in Jordan and Israel (where he picked up a nasty fungus on his lips and gum; “The kibbutz doc said, ‘Yah, you got mushrooms in your mouth.'”). He recently wrote an encyclopedic guide to the stone tools of the Near East. He has worked in Eritrea and Tanzania, in Kenya with his Stony Brook colleague Richard Leakey, the son of legendary archaeologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, and in Ethiopia, where local kids run around carrying Kalashnikovs.

It was in Ethiopia that Shea made his latest contribution to the archaeological record. Back in the sixties, Richard Leakey had found pieces of ancient
Homo sapiens
skulls, which he estimated were 130,000 years old, at Omo Kibish in southern Ethiopia. “It's a very remote area,” Shea said, “very difficult to work, and tribes are constantly cattle-raiding each other, so it's dangerous, but several of the anthropologists here decided, ‘We have new methods for dating rocks. Let's go see!'” They wanted to find the burial site and try to date the undisturbed rocks around it, but Leakey's earlier expedition had predated GPS. “We piled in the Land Rovers with the geologist and we found the sites by matching up still frames from Super 8 millimeter movies made at the time.” It was almost forty years later, but—“We found the same bush, same trees, and same gravel exposures, and pieces of the same bone with the fracture that fit right back together. It doesn't get much better than that.” Dating the rocks above the skulls, the team estimated the Omo Kibish bones to be not 130,000 but 195,000 years old, which made them the oldest
Homo sapiens
fossils yet found—“A Stony Brook discovery,” Shea said with pride.

Omo Kibish also gave Shea fresh evidence to support his belief in the intelligence of our prehistoric ancestors. He is one of a growing cadre of scientists who see the genius in “primitive” peoples. The idea that at some point early humans began to think and act like modern humans had always bothered him. He told
Science
magazine that that was “a nineteenth-century model, the idea that evolution is directional and ends with us. . . . It's an embarrassment, and we don't need it anymore.”
^*
According to Shea, the stone points that he found while hunting
Homo sapiens
fossils in Ethiopia were so well made that the people who fashioned them could not have been primitive. “These were people just like me,” he declared, people as smart and adaptive as contemporary humans, and as different from
each other as we are from other humans; they simply had different environments and challenges than we do.

Shea is like a one-man antidefamation league for our genus and species. Neandertal was the only primate whose name has become an insult, he pointed out, but
Homo neanderthalensis
survived as a species for hundreds of thousands of years. Shouldn't that command some respect? Naturally, Shea was a fan of the old GEICO commercials with their intelligent and maligned cavemen. “There's an element of truth in those,” he said. He enjoyed the commercials so much that he wrote a fan letter to the advertising agency that created them, to say, “‘Thank you. You just made it so much easier to teach paleoarchaeology.'” Though no one at the company ever responded, GEICO later gave him permission to reproduce a photo of its misunderstood caveman in one of his scientific papers.

John Shea's passion could be narrowed down to an epoch, specifically the Middle Paleolithic, from 200,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago (2,000 centuries to 400 centuries ago). “I'd like to live in the Ice Age. I'd like to be one of those first people coming out of Siberia down here into the Lower 48, one of the first Americans, just to see the brand-new world,” he said. “One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You're constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can't just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can't carry them. And no villages—no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!” Idiots, he liked to point out, “don't survive in environments with lions.”

The least probable habitat for someone like Shea was where he was most often found, at Stony Brook, amid the suburban sprawl of Long Island. He remembers flying over this place as a student. “When I was coming back from Egypt, my first trip overseas, the plane pulled out of JFK and then rolled to head up to Boston. I looked out the window and all I could see was Nassau County—you know, house house house house house, car car car car car,
swimming pool swimming pool swimming pool swimming pool swimming pool. I said to one of my professors, ‘Look at that. I could never live there.' Then I got this job, and I called him up. ‘Good for you, John. Where is it?' he asked. I said, ‘You're not going to believe it.' He says, ‘Long Island?' I said, ‘Yep.'”

Shea lives with his wife, Patricia Crawford, also an archaeologist, two minutes from campus by mountain bike, close enough, he said, “to hear the human sacrifices in the dorms.” He and Crawford cope with the claustrophobia of the suburbs by routinely biking thirty-five miles or more, and Shea usually heads to Africa for the summer dig season. They recently bought a little place in Santa Fe, and travel there four or five times a year. The high desert is where Shea feels most at home. “You just walk out the door and you're in the mountains. We have mountain lions running around the neighborhood.”

What could be better, except possibly waking up 200,000 years ago in Africa? If you were one of those creatures,
Homo heidelbergensis
or
Homo erectus
, “You know what your biggest problem would be?” Shea asked. “Getting to the ground alive. Because you probably had to sleep in a tree. Why did you have to sleep in a tree? Cuz there are at least five different kinds of carnivores living in your neighborhood and they all hunt at night. They can see at night, they can smell for kilometers, and guess what, you're on their menu.” A grin lit up his wolfish face at the challenge of outwitting his stalkers. He'd be fine. I'd be meat. And you?

But never mind the carnivores. Could he help explain the archaeology of ancient humans? I had been lost in a thicket of
Homo
this and
Homo
that—the subfield called paleoanthropology—and who better a guide than someone who helped find some of the oldest evidence of
Homo sapiens
? I asked Shea if I could sit in on one of his classes, and he promptly made space for me in the Archaeology of Human Origins. I didn't tell him I had never quite managed scientific detachment. In high school biology class, when I went to
dissect my anaesthesized frog, it pulled up the pins in its legs and jumped free.

Twice a week, over a winter and spring, I took John Shea's class, a virtual tour of significant archaeology sites around the world. Shea wanted to teach his students to think like archaeologists, so we looked at what the professionals uncovered, and tried to make sense of the fragments—tools, art, buildings, and burials. I was rewarded with hours of enlightenment, delivered in Shea's irreverent, almost gonzo patter. Did you know our proto-human ancestors had brain cases big enough to hold two beers, whereas ours are big enough to contain the contents of a six-pack? I began to grasp how tiny and fragmented and bewildering these bits of archaeological knowledge were in the vast expanse of time.

I started to absorb the language of archaeology, and began to call the humans that once roamed Europe, barrel-chest out-thrust, stone tools at the ready, Neander
tals
. My husband thought I sounded pretentious. “Don't you think somebody who teaches paleoanthropology would know the right pronunciation?” I said. I pointed out that a recent documentary on PBS, or National Geographic—one of the channels without space aliens—featured an announcer, obviously a civilian, who called them Neander
thals
, and a parade of archaeologists who carefully said Neander
tals
. I threw in with the archaeologists and leaned hard on the last syllable like a badge of defiance.
^*

Along with a sprinkling of anthropology graduate students who also audited Shea's course, I joined fifty or sixty undergraduates in a classroom from the previous century with a chalkboard and projection screen and teacher's desk up front. Through the long windows we could hear construction vehicles beeping as the university raced to build more and sleeker classrooms. The grad students were
grunges, without vanity except for their glorious high-top sneakers, purple, orange, even turquoise. They planned to drive to an archaeology conference in Memphis in mid-semester, with roadside stops in Tennessee to harvest flint for their flintknapping. They were excited to check out a bar in Memphis that had a live goat tethered to its balcony. For them, the goat was not just a gimmick with the whiff of a fraternity prank; they had lots of experience with goats. They had studied goats in the history of domestication, eaten goat in the Middle East, observed herds of goats around the world, identified goat bones and teeth in their digs. Goats would play a small but key role in our class, as Shea announced, to the grad students' delight, that the Anthropology Society would once again host the Annual Spring Goat Roast. He would show us how to make our own stone tools, which we would then use to butcher a goat. It would be, he assured us, “the social event of the spring.” The goat would already be dead, a whole carcass from a nearby meat purveyor, but I couldn't help remembering that frog that came back to life when I gave it a timid poke of the blade.

JOHN SHEA HAD
an unorthodox idea for organizing his class in the Archaeology of Human Origins. After twenty years of teaching the conventional narrative, beginning with the earliest variations of humans and moving through time toward the present, he had decided to reverse direction. The narrative form has been around for five thousand years, and “it's a behavioral universal among the people of
Homo sapiens
,” Shea said, but he considered it a flawed structure for a science class. “Narratives close off the complexity of reality,” he declared. “You're rooting your story of human origins amongst the data about which you know the least. If you make a mistake identifying the ancestor, or identifying the cause that pushed them out of the trees, or identifying whether it was tool use or bipedalism or some other factor that led them to be successful, that mistake early on in the narrative means that every single thing you inject
into that narrative is wrong.” He framed the same thought for those of us who would have been eaten by lions in earlier times: “This class is like going back in a time machine. Hot-tub time machine, only without the hot tub, and without the embarrassing memories of the 1970s.”