Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs

100 Discoveries That Changed the World

Ann R. Williams, Ann R. Williams

• Verlag: National Geographic
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781426221996
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Archéologie

Blending high adventure with history, this chronicle of 100 astonishing discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the fabulous "Lost City of the Monkey God" tells incredible stories of how explorers and archaeologists have uncovered the clues that illuminate our past. Archaeology is the key that unlocks our deepest history. Ruined cities, golden treasures, cryptic inscriptions, and ornate tombs have been found across the world, and yet these artifacts of ages past often raised more questions than answers. But with the emergence of archaeology as a scientific discipline in the 19th century, everything changed. Illustrated with dazzling photographs, this enlightening narrative tells the story of human civilization through 100 key expeditions, spanning six continents and more than three million years of history. Each account relies on firsthand reports from explorers, antiquarians, and scientists as they crack secret codes, evade looters and political suppression, fall in love, commit a litany of blunders, and uncover ancient curses. Pivotal discoveries include:

• King Tut's tomb of treasure
• Terracotta warriors escorting China's first emperor into the afterlife
• The glorious Anglo-Saxon treasure of Sutton-Hoo
• Graves of the Scythians, the real Amazon warrior women
• New findings on the grim fate of the colonists of Jamestown

With a foreword from bestselling author Douglas Preston, Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs is an expertly curated and breath-taking panorama of the human journey.

Decades of discoveries have revealed that the human family tree is much more complex than first believed. Anthropologists have charted millions of years of evolution by scrutinizing such fossils as bipedal, chimplike “Lucy” and a crafty toolmaker, known as H. habilis, that paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey found in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. The greatest discoveries in this field require luck, a good eye, and leading-edge science: A fluke of geology preserved a haunting trail of footprints for over 3.6 million years until Leakey’s wife, Mary, spotted them, and the mere chip of a pinkie bone in Siberia served up enough DNA to identify a new kind of hominin once widespread throughout Asia. As for Neanderthals, whose name has become synonymous with dumb brutes, the remains from a cave in Iraq prompt us to reconsider their reputation.

It happened some 3.66 million years ago, at the onset of a rainy season on an East African savanna pocked with wind-sculpted acacia trees. A volcano to the east, now called Sadiman, heaved restlessly, spewing ash over the flat expanse. Over a period of days the churning volcano blanketed the plain with thin layers of ash, which were interspersed with light rains. At Laetoli, in what is now Tanzania, a group of bipedal, apelike creatures continued on their way unfazed, leaving their tracks behind in the dampened ash. The conditions were perfect for preservation: Without the gentle rains, the bone-dry footprints would have disappeared in a gust of wind, while a harder shower would have obliterated them. As the dampened ash hardened, more debris settled on top, protecting the footprints in exquisite detail. Through the millennia, sediments buried them deeper, then faulting and erosion brought them near the surface again. Finally, in the late 1970s, a combination of luck and perseverance would lead to their discovery by a team led by Mary Leakey. They remain by far the oldest footprints of hominins—members of the human family—ever uncovered.

At a time when few women worked in paleoanthropology, Mary Leakey was in a league of her own. She first explored Tanzania’s Laetoli Beds in 1935 with her husband, Louis Leakey, but her passion for the past started long before that. The daughter of a painter, Mary had spent her childhood traveling through southern France with her father. “The area is full of prehistoric caves,” she said. “Both my parents were interested in them, and I scraped around the caves while father painted … After that, I don’t think I ever really wanted to do anything else.” Mary prepared for her future life with courses in geology and prehistory at University College London. Her career took off at the age of 17 with a post as an illustrator at a dig in Devon, England. She had a gift for creating incredibly detailed sketches of archaeological artifacts and the process of their extraction. That talent brought her to the attention of her future husband, who requested that she illustrate one of his books.

Beginning in the early 1930s, the pair focused their work in Africa at Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, some 20 miles northeast of Laetoli, even though most Western experts at the time thought humans evolved first in Asia. They kept returning to Olduvai Gorge over the years, and in the late 1950s and ’60s, they made momentous finds that confirmed their belief that East Africa was the cradle of humankind. But Mary had never forgotten Laetoli. “I could not help feeling,” she said, “that, somehow, the mystique of Laetoli had eluded us.”

Then in 1974, an associate found a hominin tooth at Laetoli that proved to be at least 2.4 million years old, kicking off a resurgence of interest in the site. Though her husband had passed away, Mary Leakey was drawn back to where they had begun their African adventures. In 1975, with support from the National Geographic Society, she mounted an extensive survey of the Laetoli Beds.

The team was into their second field season when fortune arrived, courtesy of an impromptu elephant dung fight. “Dr. Andrew Hill of the National Museums of Kenya and several colleagues were larking about on the beds,” Mary later wrote, “pelting each other with dry elephant dung. As Andrew ducked low to avoid one such missile, he noticed a series of punctures in the volcanic tuff.” They turned out to be animal prints, perfectly preserved in the ground beneath them. Slowly, painstakingly, the surveyors uncovered the tracks, hoping to find ancient hominin footprints among them.

After two years of searching, the effort paid off. In 1978, Paul Abell, who had joined Leakey’s team that year, came upon the first hominin imprint. It turned out to be part of an 88-foot-long, 70-footprint trail left behind by three individuals: two walking side by side, and a third following behind. Based on fossil teeth and jaws Leakey and her team also found at Laetoli, the tracks had been left by members of the earliest known human ancestor: Australopithecus afarensis, best known from the famous “Lucy” skeleton, found in Ethiopia a few years earlier, and dated to around 3.1 million years ago. The footprints pushed back the evolution of upright walking another half a million years.

The implications were astounding. The prints suggest that even at the beginning of our evolution, our ancestors’ feet were similar to ours in form and function. Besides being clearly evolved for bipedalism, with big toes in line with the rest of the foot instead of splayed out for an apelike grip when climbing, they show that early humans walked with a “heel-strike” motion, with the heel of the foot hitting first and the toes pushing off last. “This unique ability freed the hands for myriad possibilities,” Mary wrote later. “Carrying, toolmaking, intricate manipulation. From this single development, in fact, stems all modern technology.”

The compact stride of the prints suggested that A. afarensis individuals had much shorter legs than modern humans, but the record of their passage still felt eerily familiar. While studying one set, presumed to be a female’s, Mary mused: “At one point … she stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.”

In 2015, 14 more footprints were added to the collection by two Tanzanian archaeologists, who were there to evaluate whether the site could safely hold a museum. The tracks of two individuals are in the same ash layer and orientation as the ones found in 1978, intimating that they may have been made by members of the same group traveling across the landscape. One set of tracks showing larger strides was likely made by an individual over 5.5 feet tall—among the largest known members of the species. The researchers see this as a clue to the social structure of A. afarensis. If males and females of the species had substantially different body sizes, a trait called sexual dimorphism, the footprints can be read as one adult male—the large individual—along with two or three adult females and as many juveniles. This social organization would resemble that of modern-day gorillas, where one male shares multiple females. Some other researchers aren’t convinced, pointing out that it’s impossible to know the age of the individuals based on their footprints, or whether the new tracks belong to members of the same group as the original ones. Future scientists will no doubt have more to say—and discover.

It was a blistering morning in November 1974, and paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson and his colleague Tom Gray had all but given up looking for fossils in the badlands of Hadar in Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle. Johanson had been to Hadar before: in 1972 on a reconnaissance trip, and again in 1973, when he had discovered the knee joint of an ancient hominin—a member of the human family. With the temperature at 110 degrees Fahrenheit, they were heading back to their Land Rover when Johanson noticed something protruding out of the ground halfway up the slope: a fragment of a little arm bone. Johanson knew right away it was hominin. Then they noticed other pieces of bone scattered about—a piece of a skull, a bit of thighbone, some vertebrae, ribs, part of a pelvis. Incredibly, they had come upon the skeleton of a single individual over three million years old. “Tom let out a yell,” Johanson later recalled, “and then I heard myself yelling too, and we were hugging each other and dancing up and down in the heat.”

That night they celebrated back at camp, a Beatles cassette tape playing on repeat. Johanson already suspected their specimen was female, so when “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” came on, the nickname seemed to suit her. She would also get an Ethiopian name, Dinknesh—the Amharic term for “You are marvelous.” And marvelous she was: both the oldest known hominin ever found, and with 40 percent of her skeleton preserved, among the most complete.

She prompted as many questions as she had answers. What species did she belong to? Could she be our direct ancestor? What was her habitat like? How did she live, and how did she die? Johanson could confirm from the form of the pelvis that she was female. “She was small of stature,” he wrote. “The short leg bones suggested a height of three and a half to four feet.” Her erupted wisdom teeth and the growth state of certain bones indicated she was a young adult when she died.

Lucy’s most telling feature was that she clearly walked on two legs. Though her brain wasn’t much larger than a chimp’s, her pelvis, femur, foot, and knee bones were all evolved to allow her to move upright with minimal muscle fatigue. Her pelvis, for instance, was flared out to carry muscles for stability, and the angle of her femur brought her legs under her body—clear signs of bipedal ability. The discovery of Lucy thus strengthened the idea that upright walking was the earliest selective trait driving human evolution, appearing at least a million years before there was evidence for a bigger brain or toolmaking.

In addition to her small brain, Lucy had a mix of other primitive features. Her long, dangling arms, curved finger bones, and shoulder joints all indicated that in spite of its upright manner of walking, her species still climbed trees, probably in search of food or safety. “If Lucy saw an attractive fruiting tree, she would have climbed it,” wrote Johanson. “Most of the time, however, she walked on two legs like us.”

Lucy was not the only fossil Johanson would find. The following year, his team uncovered something even more amazing: a trove of almost two hundred hominin fossils from another Hadar site, including jaws, teeth, leg bones, foot and hand bones, cranial fragments, and even a piece of an infant skull. Together with Lucy and some jaws from the site of Laetoli in Tanzania, these additional specimens allowed Johanson and his colleague Tim White to name a new species they called Australopithecus afarensis (“southern ape from Afar”). It wasn’t the first Australopithecus found—that was Australopithecus africanus, discovered in South Africa in 1924, and other australopithecines with huge jaws and teeth were later found in both East and South Africa. But Johanson and White argued that A. afarensis alone was the direct ancestor of our own genus Homo. On their family tree, the other australopiths occupied a side branch in evolution that went extinct some 1.5 million years ago. Later discoveries suggested that A. afarensis was also the longest-lived hominin species ever, surviving more than 900,000 years—some three times as long as Homo sapiens have been on the planet so far.

For 20 years, Lucy remained our oldest known human ancestor. But later finds, notably Ardipithecus ramidus, another species found in the Afar, pushed the human lineage’s split from the ones leading to chimps back at least to 4.4 million years ago. Analyses of the evolution of genes suggest the split may be even more ancient. Yet Lucy remains the most iconic hominin skeleton, both for her profound antiquity and her relative completeness. “As I walked to my tent,” Johanson wrote at the end of one Hadar field season, “it comforted me to realize that Hadar would wait for us, the forces of nature slowly uncovering more fossils from the layers of time. And there would always be more to learn in the quest for understanding of mankind’s origins.” Lucy changed our understanding of human history, and she and her homeland may yet have more secrets to share.

Passionate and strong-willed, focused and devoted: Louis and Mary Leakey and their son Richard came to be known as the first family of paleoanthropology in the mid-20th century. The Leakeys played a pivotal role in convincing the scientific community that Africa held the key to understanding our origins, but it was a long road, and one paved with potholes.

Born in colonial Kenya to Anglican missionaries, Louis grew up among the local Kikuyu, who taught him to throw a spear, love wildlife, and carefully observe his surroundings. At Cambridge, where Louis picked up degrees in anthropology and archaeology, he was in every way a contrarian, and one who wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers. When he proclaimed that he planne...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction by Douglas Preston
• Chapter 1 | 3.6 mya–50,000 B.C.: Bones of Our Ancestors
• Chapter 2 | 50,000–3000 B.C.: The Dawn of Culture
• Chapter 3 | 3000–1500 B.C.: The Foundations of Society
• Chapter 4 | 1500–1000 B.C.: Converging Worlds
• Chapter 5 | 1000–500 B.C.: Ancient Tribes & Dynasties
• Chapter 6 | 500–200 B.C.: An Age of Artisans
• Chapter 7 | 200 B.C.–A.D. 75: Rituals & Religion
• Chapter 8 | A.D. 75–600: Tombs & Temples
• Chapter 9 | A.D. 600–1000: Surprises & Mysteries
• Chapter 10 | A.D. 1000–1200: Great Builders
• Chapter 11 | 1200–1600: Sovereigns & Citizens
• Chapter 12 | 1600–Present: A Changing World Order
• Afterword by Fredrik Hiebert
• Glossary of Archaeological Terms: The Future of Studying the Past
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations Credits