Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (97 page)

Realising the coup Korolev had produced, Khrushchev called him to the Kremlin and instructed him to provide something even more spectacular to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the revolution.
⁶⁷
Korolev’s response was
Sputnik 2,
launched a month after
Sputnik 1 —
with Laika, a mongrel dog, aboard. As a piece of theatre it could not be faulted, but as science it left a lot to be desired. After refusing to separate from its booster,
Sputnik
2’s thermal control system failed, the satellite overheated – and Laika was roasted. Animal rights groups protested, but the Russians dismissed the complaints, arguing that Laika had been ‘a martyr to a noble cause.’
⁶⁸
And in any case,
Sputnik 2
was soon followed by
Sputnik 3.
⁶⁹
This was intended as the most sophisticated and productive of all the satellites, equipped with sensitive measuring devices to assess a whole range of atmospheric and cosmological phenomena. Korolev’s immediate motive was to heap further humiliation on the United States – but he came another cropper. During tests for the satellite, a crucial tape recorder failed to work. To have rectified it thoroughly would have delayed the launch, and the man responsible, Alexei Bogomolov, ‘did not want to be considered a loser in the company of winners.’ He argued that the failure was due to electrical interference in the test room and that such interference wouldn’t exist in space. No one else was taken in – except the one man who counted, Korolev.
⁷⁰
The tape recorder duly failed in flight. Nothing sensational occurred – there was no spectacular explosion – but crucial information was not recorded. As a result, it was the Americans, whose
Explorer 3
had finally been launched on 26 March 1958, who observed a belt of massive radiation around the earth that became known as the Van Allen belts, after James Van Allen, who designed the instruments that
did
record the phenomenon.
⁷¹
And so, after the initial space flight, with all that implied, the first major scientific discovery was made not by Korolev but by the late-arriving Americans. Korolev’s personality was responsible for both his successes and his failures.
⁷²

Nineteenth-fifty-eight was the first full year of the space age, with twenty-two launch attempts, though only five were successful. Korolev went on securing ‘firsts,’ including unmanned landings on the moon and Venus, and in April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the earth. When Korolev died, in January 1966, he was buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a supreme honour. But his identity was always kept secret while he was alive; it is only recently he has received his full due.

Character was certainly crucial to the fifth great scientific advance that took place in the 1950s. Neither can one rule out the role of luck. For the fact is that Mary and Louis Leakey, archaeologists and palaeontologists, had been excavating in Africa, in Kenya and Tanganyika (later Tanzania) since the 1930s without finding anything especially significant. In particular, they had dug at
Olduvai Gorge, a 300-foot-deep, thirty-mile-long chasm cut into the Serengeti Plain, part of the so-called Rift Valley that runs north-south through the eastern half of Africa and is generally held to be the border between two massive tectonic plates.
⁷³
For scientists, the Olduvai Gorge had been of interest ever since it had first been discovered in 1911, when a German entomologist named Wilhelm Kattwinkel almost fed into it as he chased butterflies.
⁷⁴
Climbing down into the gorge, which cuts through many layers of sediments, he discovered innumerable fossil bones lying around, and these caused a stir when he got them back to Germany because they included parts of an extinct horse. Later expeditions found sections of a modern human skeleton, and this led some scientists to the conclusion that Olduvai was a perfect place for the study of extinct forms of life, including – perhaps – ancestors of mankind.

It says a lot for the Leakeys’ strength of character that they dug at Olduvai from the early 1930s until 1959 without making the earth-shattering discovery they always hoped for.
⁷⁵
Until that time, as was mentioned in earlier chapters, it was believed early man originated in Asia. Born in Kenya to a missionary family, Louis had found his first fossils at the age of twelve and had never stopped from then on. His quixotic character involved to begin with a somewhat lackadaisical approach to scientific evidence, which ensured that he was never offered a formal academic position.
⁷⁶
In the prewar moral climate Leakey’s career was not helped either by an acrimonious divorce from his first wife, which put paid to his chances of an academic position in straitlaced Cambridge.
⁷⁷
Another factor was his activity as a British spy at the time of Kenya’s independence movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, culminating in his appearance to give evidence in court against Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the independence party, and later the country’s first president.
⁷⁸
(Kenyatta never seems to have borne a grudge.) Finally, there was Leakey’s fondness for a succession of young women. There was nothing one-dimensional about Leakey, and his character was central to his discoveries and to what he made of them.

During the 1930s, until most excavation was halted because of the war, the Leakeys had dug at Olduvai more years than not. Their most notable achievement was to find a massive collection of early manmade tools. Louis and his second wife Mary were the first to realise that dint tools were not going to be found in that part of Africa, as they had been found all over Europe, say, because in East Africa generally, flint is lacking. They did, however, find ‘pebble tools’ – basalt and quartzite especially – in abundance.
⁷⁹
This convinced Leakey that he had found a ‘living floor,’ a sort of prehistoric living room where early man made tools in order to eat the carcasses of the several extinct species that by now had been discovered in or near Olduvai. After the war, neither he nor Mary revisited Olduvai until 1951, in the wake of the Kenyatta trial, but they dug there through most of the 1950s. Throughout the decade they found thousands of hand axes and, associated with them, fossilised bones of many extinct mammals: pigs, buffalos, antelopes, several of them much bigger than today’s varieties, evoking a romantic image of an Africa inhabited by huge, primitive animals. They renamed this living floor ‘the Slaughter House.’
⁸⁰
At that stage, according to Virginia Morrell, the Leakeys’ biographer, they thought
that the lowest bed in the gorge dated to about 400,000 years ago and that the highest bed was 15,000 years old. Louis had lost none of his enthusiasm, despite having reached middle age without finding any humans in more than twenty years of searching. In 1953 he got so carried away by his digging that he spent too long in the African sun and suffered such a severe case of sunstroke that his hair ‘turned from brown to white, literally overnight.’
⁸¹
The Leakeys were kept going by the occasional find of hominid teeth (being so hard, teeth tend to survive better than other parts of the human body), so Louis remained convinced that one day the all-important skull would turn up.

On the morning of 17 July 1959, Louis awoke with a slight fever. Mary insisted he stay in camp. They had recently discovered the skull of an extinct giraffe, so there was plenty to do.
⁸²
Mary drove off in the Land Rover, alone except for her two dogs, Sally and Victoria. That morning she searched a site in Bed I, the lowest and oldest, known as FLK (for Frieda Leakey’s
Korongo,
Frieda Leakey being Louis’s first wife and
korongo
being Swahili for gully). Around eleven o’clock, with the heat becoming uncomfortable, Mary chanced on a sliver of bone that ‘was not lying loose on the surface but projecting from beneath. It seemed to be part of a skull…. It had a hominid look, but the bones seemed enormously thick – too thick, surely,’ as she wrote later in her autobiography.
⁸³
Dusting off the topsoil, she observed ‘two large teeth set in the curve of a jaw.’ At last, after decades. There could be no doubt: it was a hominid skull.
⁸⁴
She jumped back into the Land Rover with the two dogs and rushed back to camp, shouting ‘I’ve got him! I’ve got him!’ as she arrived. Excitedly, she explained her find to Louis. He, as he put it later, became ‘magically well’ in moments.
⁸⁵

When Louis saw the skull, he could immediately see from the teeth that it wasn’t an early form of
Homo
but probably australopithecine, that is, more apelike. But as they cleared away the surrounding sod, the skull revealed itself as enormous, with a strong jaw, a flat face, and huge zygomatic arches – or cheekbones – to which great chewing muscles would have been attached. More important, it was the third australopithecine skull the Leakeys had found in association with a hoard of tools. Louis had always explained this by assuming that the australopithecines were the victims of
Homo
killers, who then feasted on the more primitive form of ancestor. But now Louis began to change his mind – and to ask himself if it wasn’t the australopithecines who had made the tools. Tool making had always been regarded as the hallmark of humanity – and now, perhaps, humanity should stretch back to the australopithecines.

Before long, however, Louis convinced himself that the new skull was actually midway between australopithecines and modern
Homo sapiens
and so he called the new find
Zinjanthropus boisei – Zinj
being the ancient Arabic word for the coast of East Africa,
anthropos
denoting the fossil’s humanlike qualities, and
boisei
after Charles Boise, the American who had funded so many of their expeditions.
⁸⁶
Because he was so complete, so old and so strange, Zinj made the Leakeys famous. The discovery was front-page news across the world, and Louis became the star of conferences in Europe, North America, and Africa. At these conferences, Leakey’s interpretation of Zinj met some resistance from
other scholars who thought that Leakey’s new skull, despite its great size, was not all that different from other australopithecines found elsewhere. Time would prove these critics right and Leakey wrong. But while Leakey was arguing his case with others about what the huge, flat skull meant, two scientists elsewhere produced a completely unexpected twist on the whole matter. A year after the discovery of Zinj, Leakey wrote an article for the
National Geographic
magazine, ‘Finding the World’s Earliest Man,’ in which he put
Zinjanthropus
at 600,000 years old.
⁸⁷
As it turned out, he was way off.

Until the middle of the century, the main dating technique for fossils was the traditional archaeological device of stratigraphy, analysing sedimentation layers. Using this technique, Leakey calculated that Olduvai dated from the early Pleistocene, generally believed to be the time when the giant animals such as the mammoth lived on earth alongside man, extending from 600,000 years ago until around 10,000 years ago. Since 1947, a new method of dating, the carbon-14 technique, had been introduced. C
¹⁴
dating depends on the fact that plants take out of the air carbon dioxide, a small proportion of which is radioactive, having been bombarded by cosmic rays from space. Photosynthesis converts this C0
₂
into radioactive plant tissue, which is maintained as a constant proportion until the plant (or the organism that has eaten the plant) dies, when radioactive carbon uptake is stopped. Radioactive carbon is known to have a half-life of roughly 5,700 years, and so, if the proportion of radioactive carbon in an ancient object is compared with the proportion of radioactive carbon in contemporary objects, it is possible to calculate how long has elapsed since that organism’s death. With its relatively short half-life, however, C
¹⁴
is only useful for artefacts up to roughly 40,000 years old. Shortly after Leakey’s
National Geographic
article appeared, two geophysicists from the University of California at Berkeley, Jack Evernden and Garniss Curtis, announced that they had dated some volcanic ash from Bed I of Olduvai – where Zinj had been found – using the potassium-argon (K/Ar) method. In principle, this method is analogous to C
¹⁴
dating but uses the rate at which the unstable radioactive potassium isotope potassium-40 (K
⁴⁰
) decays to stable argon-40 (Ar
⁴⁰
). This can be compared with the known abundance of K
⁴⁰
in natural potassium, and an object’s age calculated from the half-life. Because the half-life of K
⁴⁰
is about 1.3 billion years, this method is much more suitable for geological material.
⁸⁸

Using the new method, the Berkeley geophysicists came up with the startling news that Bed I at Olduvai was not 600,000 but 1.75
million
years old.
⁸⁹
This was a revelation, the very first clue that early man was, much, much older than anyone suspected. This, as much as the actual discovery of
Zinj,
made Olduvai Gorge famous. In the years that followed, many more skulls and skeletons of early hominids would be found in East Africa, sparking bitter controversy about how, and when, early man developed. But the ‘bone rush’ in the Rift Valley ready dates from the fantastic publicity surrounding the discovery of
Zinj
and its great antiquity. This eventually produced the breathtakingly audacious idea – almost exactly one hundred years after Darwin – that man originated in Africa and then spread out to populate the globe.