Book Reviews

Battling for Bones

Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia’s Afar Depression, by John Kalb. Copernicus Books, New York, NY, 2000, 406 pp., $29.00 hardcover.

Although John Kalb is not likely to be as familiar a name to those who follow paleoanthropology as Louis Leakey, Donald Johanson, or Yves Coppens, as an early participant in the “bone wars” of the 1970s, Kalb enjoyed a unique vantage point to observe and record the science, politics, and personalities of the time. What materializes is not always flattering: a culture of science interested more in mining a country’s fossil resources than working with its people, and scientists willing to betray each other in the quest for professional glory. This firsthand account of the people who have helped shape the study of human origins makes for an enlightening case study into how paleoanthropology gets done outside the ivory tower and down in the trenches.

When Kalb first traveled from the United States as a graduate student to Ethiopia’s Afar Depression in 1971, no one knew that it would be the source of so many remarkable finds. Having read of spectacular hominid discoveries from Ethiopia’s Olduvai Gorge and the Omo River, he suspected that there was also enormous potential for unearthing skeletons and archaeological remains in the Afar, a northern continuation of the Rift Valley. After raising money to fund his fieldwork, Kalb joined forces with French geologist Maurice Taieb and set out to map and document the region. Soon it became obvious that his suspicions were true, and Kalb, Taieb, and later Johanson and Coppens, began prospecting.

However, it was Johanson who made the first significant discovery in 1972, and simmering personal frictions and nationalistic infighting soon gave way to outright schism. Hobbled by innuendo and, he later discovered, accusations of being a CIA operative by other researchers, Kalb lost access to many of the fossil sites he helped pioneer, and struggled to secure funds and permits to continue his work. Although he remained in Ethiopia intermittently until 1981, and was a part of important hominid finds such as the Bodo cranium, an approximately 600,000-year-old member of the Homo lineage, Kalb’s contributions would remain overshadowed by other spectacular finds from the Afar such as “Lucy” and the “First Family.” He would ultimately be squeezed out of Ethiopia altogether by larger and better-financed expeditions.

Kalb intersperses these professional highs and lows with anecdotes of friends and colleagues and succinct descriptions of the geology and history of the region. We learn about everything, from the lives and personalities of the Ethiopian and Afar people Kalb befriended and worked with to the country’s headfirst plunge into chaos, civil war, and famine.

Kalb makes it clear that there are two ways to conduct fieldwork: one in which fossils are treated like resources to be exploited, and another where scientists are actively involved helping local people cultivate and maintain their heritage. Clearly, Kalb is of the latter school. One of the most admirable aspects of this book is his genuine concern for the Ethiopian people. Kalb emphasizes that fieldwork should be more than just “fossil-mining,” and attempt to incorporate and train local people to find, curate, and analyze the fossils and artifacts collected from their own country.

—Nathan Young

A Bed of Riches

Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life, by David W. Wolfe. Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, 2001, 240 pp., $26.00 hardcover.

Surface chauvinism” is not one of the things you are likely to be accused of, even in these days of near-pervasive political correctness. But if David Wolfe is to be believed, almost all of us are guilty of it.

When we walk through a forest, we see towering greatness and dappled shade. Mentally, we treat the earth beneath it like dirt. Yet the weight of living things below the soil in any particular area far outstrips the tonnage of what lives above. We are, it appears, all biological bigots.

In Tales from the Underground, Wolfe guides us to a more reasonable and inclusive path, one where all living things stun and amaze us equally. Think a rainforest is diverse? There are more individual animals and more genetic diversity in your average planter of soil. Think herds of wildebeest are breathtakingly numerous, as they thunder madly across the African savanna? Consider the billions of nematodes in one square yard of soil in your garden, advises Wolfe (who, given his predilections, would probably prefer another surname, such as “Slimemoulde,” perhaps).

This beautifully written book ranges widely over topics as diverse as the role of clay particles in the evolution of early life, to the sex life of fungi, to Charles Darwin’s lifelong obsession with earthworms. We meet bacteria that eat rock, some that feast on iron, and others that are so genetically distant from ourselves that the tree of life had to be completely revamped to accommodate them. Bigger beasts also get a look in. Explorers’ journals give awed descriptions of the size of the prairie dog towns they encountered on their early trips west. One was the size of West Virginia (25,000 square miles) and contained an estimated 400 million animals.

Tales also describes how ideas and discoveries come about and the personalities of the scientists behind them. When personalized in such a way, the serendipitous nature of scientific development becomes very clear.

Wolfe does not allow his enthusiasm to become a lecture—he is both brisk and informative throughout. Backed with a sprinkle of clear diagrams, well-chosen photographs, and the occasional old lithograph, this is the kind of book that you wished for at school—lucid and relevant, with enough background to bring it to life and cool facts to amaze and impress your friends.

Five hundred years ago Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” That is still true. But with Wolfe’s marvelous manifesto as an inspiration, it may not be long before soil ecology and its extraordinary diversity take their rightful place in our appreciation of the Earth.

—Adrian Barnett

The Life Within

Liaisons of Life: From Hornworts to Hippos, How the Unassuming Microbe has Driven Evolution, by Tom Wakeford. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 2001, 190 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Charles Darwin meditated deeply on the emerging science of symbiosis. In 1868, he wrote, “Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm—a little universe, formed from a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”

Having read Wakeford’s Liaisons of Life, it seems as if the guru of evolution was right. Microbes, the “demons” of our sanitized society, appear to be not only the glue that holds the whole structure of life together, but also the engines of evolution.

Wakeford shows us how these versatile organisms have shaped life. Once microbes take up residence, they may change an animal’s behavior. For example, some female butterflies infected with Wolbachia bacteria take up lekking like males. Microbes can crack tough cellulose walls, giving cockroaches and termites the ability to eat wood. They can detoxify dangerous chemicals, synthesize essential amino acids, and recycle nitrogen, conferring these benefits to host organisms which gain an edge in the struggle to survive.

Every living thing is made up of many others, from the protoplasts of plants that were once free-living bacteria to the mitochondria in animal cells whose DNA fingerprint clearly shows a bacterial heritage. Ninety percent of all trees and fungi depend upon each other, with trees’ roots providing sugars and amino acids to fungi in exchange for soil minerals. Humans are chock-full of remnant “bugs,” including hairlike cilia in the balance organs of our inner ears, which may well be descendants of spirochetes, and the teeming digestive factories of our intestines. Eerier examples yet blur the boundaries of the kingdoms that biologists have so painstakingly established. Lichens, Beatrix Potter’s first love, are more fabulous creatures than any immortalized in her books: a marriage between alga and fungus, each unable to survive without the other. Then there’s Convoluta, neither animal nor plant, but a composite organism made up of a flatworm and an alga. Microbes can settle comfortably into coexistence with any other life-form. As in any relationship, there may be a period of discord, but if they survive, the two may well become one flesh—even a new species.

Wakeford asserts that Louis Pasteur’s groundbreaking work on “germs” conditioned the world to believe that all microbes are pathogens. Even today, researchers assume that microbes in plants or animals are up to no good, only to retract their statements later. That happened when Heliobacter pyloris, a normal resident of our digestive tract, was linked to stomach ulcers. Wakeford argues convincingly that having too few, rather than too many, bugs are what cause many ailments. Most immune system disorders such as asthma and juvenile-onset diabetes are prevalent not in “filthy” third-world countries but in super-hygienic, upper-class, first-world cities in Britain, Australia, Sweden, and the United States.

Like a scanning electron microscope, Liaisons of Life makes visible the wonder of the ultrasmall, shedding light on the most abundant and successful group of organisms on Earth. But like a scanning scope, the speed is a little slow, as these ideas need pondering. After a thorough read, you’ll think twice before reaching for antibacterial soap again!

—Suzanne Ubick

The Giants Among Us

Coast Redwood: A Natural and Cultural History, by Michael Barbour et al, Cachuma Press, Los Olivos, CA, 2001, 228 pp., $37.95 cloth, $27.95 paper.

California’s mighty coast redwoods have long inspired a deep sense of awe. These are trees tall beyond imagination, with massive girths and 2,000-year lifespans that dwarf the timescale of our own lives. And in the troubled and uncertain world of human affairs, the hushed interiors of ancient redwood forests offer us respite and healing found in few other places. It is surprising, therefore, how few of the venerable old redwood groves have been protected from the woodsman’s saws, and how each act of preservation has arisen only out of great struggle.

In celebration of these trees arrives a marvelous, deeply informative book richly illustrated with over 330 photographs. Written by a team of authors led by distinguished plant ecologist Michael Barbour, Coast Redwood is a fascinating account of the plants, animals, and ecology of coastal redwood forests as well as the long history of redwood logging and the broad-based coalitions that fought to preserve them. The book offers a new look at an ecosystem that early foresters mistakenly referred to as “zoological deserts.”

The book’s only shortcoming, if it has one, is the lack of details about where to find ancient redwood forests. Many of the 30 parks and reserves in California that contain significant stands are referred to repeatedly in the text but are not easy to locate on commonly available maps.

While the wood of coast redwoods is one of California’s most important natural resources, redwood communities have yet to be fully understood and adequately protected—a story that should be of great interest to all Californians.

—David Lukas

Recommended Reading from the Editors’ Desks

Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World, by Ann Moyal. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2001, 240 pp., $21.95 cloth.

With a beak on its snout and fine dense fur on its torpedo-like body, the platypus, when discovered in 1792, left naturalists agape with disbelief. Was it a bird or a mammal? Did it lay eggs, give birth to live young, or something inbetween? Part of an astonishing Australian fauna that defied existing systems of classification, the platypus even outshone the strangely pouched marsupials.

Historian Ann Moyal deftly portrays European scientists’ confusion over the platypus’s position in “The Great Chain of Life,” and how they catapulted the secretive animal into the day’s most far-reaching scientific debates. From Georges Cuvier to Charles Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Europe’s most eminent scientists all cited its strange juxtaposition of features to shore up their own views on creation and the proper approach to systematics.

But the experts’ mistrust of the firsthand observations by aborigines and Australian settlers meant that the central mystery of the platypus, its mode of development, would remain a mystery for nearly a century. Only in 1884 did Scotsman William Caldwell and a cadre of aboriginal assistants come up with the solution in the form of a pair of round, leathery eggs. Score two for the Australian wonder.

Volcanoes in America’s National Parks by Robert Decker and Barbara Decker. Odyssey Publications, Union Lake, MI, 2001, 250 pp., $24.95 paper.

The tremendous power and mystery of volcanoes has made them frequent targets for tales of disaster. Robert and Barbara Decker break this tendency and strike a rare balance with Volcanoes, offering an undramatized yet captivating look inside one of nature’s most awesome and revered manifestations.

Robert, a veteran volcanologist, and Barbara, a science writer, detail everything from how shifting continental plates give birth to these giant caldrons of hot magma, to their often violent transformations of Earth’s ecosystems. Learn about volcanic “bombs,” and how columnar “hoodoo” towers like those in Arizona’s Chiricahua National Monument are formed.

The Deckers then bring us to the nearly 40 volcanoes and volcano remnants in America’s national parks. Discover “live” volcanoes like Hawaii’s Kilauea, which has been erupting since 1983, “sleeping” volcanoes building up steam for a future eruption, and “ancient fires,” dramatic granite formations like those in Yosemite Valley that were once underground magma chambers. The Deckers dig deep into the geologic history and unique characteristics of each place and then succinctly sum it up with a page of maps, directions, and other details, making it a hot guide for the curious traveler.