The Elusive Baboon (eBook)

CHAPTER 1: BABOON MAN

A collection of fossil remains of extinct, giant baboons was gathering dust in a remote corner of the British Museum of Natural History. Some had been collected at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and at Olorgesailie and Kanjera in Kenya, by the renowned archaeologists and paleoanthropologists Mary and Louis Leakey. Some had been collected as early as the 1930s, and no one had studied them since.

It was now 1960, the year that marked the beginning of a decade of dramatic social, economic, and political change. That year John F. Kennedy won the closest presidential election of the century in the United States; the Soviets shot down a US U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Gary Powers; a furious Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a desk at the United Nations; Xerox introduced the paper copier machine; Psycho was the most talked about film; and birth control pills were approved by the FDA, opening the way to a sexual revolution. A little known English rock group with the strange name of The Beatles gave the first performance of their careers in Hamburg, Germany, and Britain’s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, gave a significant “Winds of Change” speech signaling Britain’s intention to grant independence to a number of its African colonies.

Later that year, a young anthropologist, my future husband, Cliff Jolly, dusted off the baboon fossils, laid them on a desk, and pored over them. He was on a quest as he measured them and made notes on these one-to-three-million-year-old relics. These dusty fragments had once been living, breathing primates, sharing their African habitat with early human ancestors. Could their lifeways, interpreted from their bones and teeth, help to unravel some of the mystery surrounding human evolutionary origins? He would use the results as the basis for his Ph.D. dissertation.

But Cliff wasn’t supposed to be there. In 1957, three years before Macmillan made his “Winds of Change” speech, Cliff had been accepted at Oxford as an undergraduate to read law, thinking he could go into the Colonial Service as a route to studying human cultural and physical evolution. But when he realized he could achieve his goal more directly by studying anthropology, he had turned down the place at Oxford, much to the chagrin of his headmaster, himself an Oxford man. His parents too were disappointed. Neither of them had been to college, and here was their only son saying no to one of the most prestigious universities in the world. But he had made up his mind. And his life set off on a totally different course.

The Anthropology Department at University College, London, readily accepted him as an undergraduate. The program focused on social anthropology, but also included prehistoric archaeology and physical anthropology—the study of blood, bones, genetics, and evolution. Cliff chose to focus on physical anthropology and, in doing so, made a complete switch from his previous high school studies of German, French, Latin, and history. A brilliant Latin scholar, he used his Latin to figure out the etymology of almost any word thrown at him.

I once asked, “What does ‘solipsism’ mean, Cliff?”

He looked up from reading: “Surely you know that, Jen? It’s the theory that self is the only reality. Comes from solus—alone, and ipse—the self.”

“Hmm,” I said, somewhat miffed by the implied put-down, and went off to find a more obscure word. He seemed puzzled that others didn’t think the way he did.

Although he had never formally studied the biological sciences, Cliff had always taken a keen interest in animals, birds, and plant life. An avid bird watcher with exceptional eyesight and hearing, he could readily spot the detailed markings on birds and identify their songs, and he knew the Latin names for many species of plants. A voracious reader with a retentive memory, he could talk to experts about fossils, birds, mammals, plants, and geology. He also had an extensive knowledge of English history and appreciated old buildings and prehistoric monuments. Physical anthropology turned out to be a good choice, and Cliff eventually became an acknowledged expert in that field. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For some reason, this brainy man, who some said looked rather like the young Michael Caine without glasses, took a fancy to me, though we were opposites in many ways. He was intellectual, I was practical; he was logical, I was emotional; he looked at things in depth while I skimmed the surface. We had both been born just before World War II broke out, but he, like Darwin, was a creative Aquarius; I was a many-sided Gemini.

We came from different parts of England. Cliff was an only child who grew up near to London and all it offered in the way of museums, the zoo, theaters, art galleries, and music. I grew up with a younger brother and many cousins in an iron-and-steel town in North Lincolnshire, where the night skies lit up with the intense glare thrown off by white-hot molten slag tipped from huge ladles onto enormous gray solidified slag-heaps. Our town was industrial but situated in an agricultural county and surrounded by picturesque old villages. We could cycle to one named Alkborough, which had a rare and very ancient turf-maze named Julian’s Bower, said to be either Roman or Medieval in origin. When you sat in that soothing place surrounded by quiet on top of a hill, you could look down onto the confluence of the dark gray-green waters of the Rivers Trent and Ouse, forming the River Humber, which flowed into the North Sea. It separated the East Riding of Yorkshire, to the north, from North Lincolnshire to the south. Tennyson’s birthplace, in the small village of Somersby, was only forty-five miles away from us, and just eight miles away was Epworth, the birthplace of John Wesley, the Methodist preacher. Lincoln, with its magnificent mediaeval cathedral founded around 1088, was less than thirty miles along the A15, which followed the straight old Roman Road.

After the discovery of iron ore and the development of the steelworks in the mid-nineteenth century, our town had been formed when five villages, all with Anglo-Saxon and old Scandinavian names—Crosby, Ashby, Brumby, Frodingham, and Scunthorpe—amalgamated under the name Scunthorpe, though each village managed to retain some of its own identity. Scunthorpe thrived as a boom town during the 1950s, but people thought the name sounded funny and it became fodder for music hall jokes. Yet those of us who grew up there were attached to it. You could easily bicycle out of town into the surrounding countryside for picnics, people were friendly, and there was a strong sense of community. Our lives centered on the steelworks, the town’s soccer team, cricket, horse racing, pubs, and families. Scunthorpe had a movie theater that we frequented as teenagers, and pantomimes like Puss in Boots were staged at Christmas, but if you wanted “real culture,” such as Shakespeare, an opera, or art galleries, the nearest place was Leeds, about fifty-two miles away.

London was 180 miles away, a very long distance at that time, but in 1951, when I was twelve, I went there on my biggest school trip. We traveled by train and back in a day, setting off very early and returning very late, to visit the Festival of Britain in Battersea Park on the South Bank of the Thames. The Festival marked the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton’s wonderful iron-and-glass edifice, and aimed to lift the spirits of a nation still struggling to recover from the devastation of World War II. I was thrilled that my parents let me go, and excited to see the futuristic cigar-shaped Skylon pointing to the sky, the mushroom-shaped Dome of Discovery, and souvenir shops where I bought a commemorative five-shilling piece. To me, London was a place of wonder, but it seemed almost beyond reach from North Lincolnshire, especially by car, because at that time the journey took a full day, as the road wound its way through the narrow streets of small country towns. Nevertheless, in my teens I set my heart on some day living in London.

In those days women were expected to marry by around the age of twenty-one and have their husbands take care of them. Women like me had three main career choices: secretary, nurse, or teacher. Those who wanted to be a secretary or nurse left school at sixteen. I was expected to go to university, which meant I would stay on until eighteen. I thought a career in teaching would be a reasonable choice, but my mother, herself a teacher, was adamantly opposed to it. Apparently she wanted something different for me, and her influence prevailed. I was not going to teach but I envied those who knew what their futures held because I had no clue. I was interested in medicine, because I thought I might be able to contribute in the neglected field of women’s medicine, but wasn’t sure I could handle life-and-death responsibilities. I was an excellent pianist but not at concert standards and, in any case, was nervous when I had to perform in public. I was a good tennis player, but that was no career. I had always had an interest in acting and liked the idea of being someone who was not me living in different worlds, but in high school I had been told that, at five-foot-nine, I was too tall. I shut up about it, became sick of people telling me how tall I was, and developed a huge chip on my shoulder about my height. My mother was six inches shorter and wore fashionable, expensive high-heeled Italian shoes to add to her height. I wished I could do that. My mum expected me to marry, but she also thought I should have a career and said ominously, “You never...