National Geographic: Mysteries of Mankind Page #5

---

with Australopithecines is

that you have something that's right

on the line between being human

and not human.

You have a lot of features

that are ape like

and yet it's in the process

of becoming human.

The reconstruction will take

Gurche more than two months.

It is painstaking,

arduous work that often continues

well into the night.

I'd really like to be able

to make the claim

for this kind of

work that it's a hard science.

Unfortunately, it's not.

It's as good as it can be

without actually going back

in time and coming face to face

with our ancestors.

The end result is often

a surprise even to me.

I'm basing the restoration on

clues one by one

that I'm getting from the bony anatomy

and the cumulative effect

of those clues is often a surprise.

A face long lost to the tides of time

emerges out of plaster and clay.

We come face to face with one of

out earliest known relatives

across a chasm of three million years.

More than half a million years

before Lucy

and more than a thousand miles away,

a volcano erupted

spewing ash across

Tanzania's Serengeti Plain.

Then a moment was frozen in time.

An amazing sequence of

chance events created a record unique

in the pageant of prehistory.

Soon after the eruption the rain

clouds that had been threatening parted.

Then three hominids,

perhaps of the same species as Lucy,

walked by.

Their footprints left an impression

in the dampened ashfall.

Only because the sun then came out did

the footprints harden.

And only because continued eruptions

laid down yet other layers of ash

were the traces entombed more than

three and a half million years.

Today this area,

not far from Olduvai Gorge in

northern Tanzania, is called Laetoli.

Here, in 1978,

a team led by Dr. Mary Leakey

finds what is one of the most

astounding archaeological discoveries

of all time the very footprints

not seen on this earth

since the eruption of

one volcano millions of years ago.

Dr. Leakey and her team begin

the delicate process

of removing the cement hard rock.

To Dr. Leakey the prints

are more evocative than any fossil.

They tell a vivid story

of one fleeting moment in time.

The track of footprints that

you see here on my left

was a truly remarkable find

that we made this season.

It's a trail left by three people

who walked across a flat expanse

of volcanic ash

three and a half million years ago.

We can say they were relatively short.

We can estimate that their height was

probably between four and five feet.

We can say they had

this free striding walk.

One assumes they were

perhaps holding hands or

They are so evenly spaced, the tracks,

and they're keeping step,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes