Into the Inferno Page #4

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a very limited amount of evidence

this far back in time.

In particular,

there are very few human fossils

to try and establish cause and effect.

If we want to find human fossils

from 74,000 years ago,

we'd better go to Ethiopia,

we'd better go to the Afar Region.

This is part

of the Danakil Depression,

300 feet below sea level.

In terms of average

year-round temperature,

this is the hottest place on our planet.

During summer,

temperatures hardly ever dip

below 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Working conditions are only tolerable

in mid-winter,

and even then it is extremely hot.

On top of that,

this is an area of tribal warfare,

and you can only enter it

accompanied by armed soldiers.

This depression is only part

of a long, stretched rift,

continuing down

through all of East Africa.

In millions of years,

the rift will widen

until a strip of the continent

breaks off,

drifting into the Indian Ocean.

In such places, volcanoes form.

This particular one, Erta Ale,

is one of the three in the world

where magma is directly exposed.

Erta Ale is also important

for its significance to early man.

A great amount of obsidian,

a volcanic glass,

was extruded from the crater.

Look at that.

It's translucent at the edges.

Beautiful flake.

And very sharp still.

You could probably shave with that.

Obsidian is very hard and brittle,

and therefore fractures

with extremely sharp edges.

So sharp, in fact,

that up until the 1980s

eye operations were performed

with obsidian scalpels,

sharper than any steel.

This amazing material has attracted

early humans to this landscape

as far back as hominids

a million years ago.

At this site,

a team of paleontologists

are extracting artifacts and remains

of our direct ancestors,

the first Homo sapiens,

who emerged in this area

100,000 years ago.

What is amazing to me is the fact

that the remains are found

almost directly at the surface.

And more so,

why this particular spot

and not back there

where the goats are roaming?

This grid was apparently

a tool manufacturing site.

Hundreds of obsidian chips

are strewn about.

Dr. Yonatan Sahle,

an Ethiopian scientist,

has excavated this prehistoric workshop.

And where did your passion come from?

How did you fall into this field?

Well, I had, I studied history

for my bachelor's degree.

And that's when

I started to fall in love.

So, history was not deep enough for me.

I wanted to look further back in time

and find out what is it, really,

that makes us human.

We are a very unique species.

In a way, we interact

and we collaborate

and we cooperate and we produce,

we modify our environment.

But at the same time,

we fight and destruct,

and we are even a danger

to other species and the planet,

the fate of the planet as well.

So, we are a very interesting species.

So, I wanted to get at the root

of all this

and see, in deep time,

what underlies all these processes.

We're sifting

through the trash of humans

from 50 to 100,000 years ago.

Do you think we have

another 100,000 years on planet Earth?

I would say that, you know,

another thousand years,

we will be in a very critical situation,

and so we will have to learn

from our mistakes

and we'll have to work

toward improving...

the condition of our planet

so that it can have the carrying capacity

to allow our species to perpetuate.

If you had a time machine

that could go

to only one time period in the past,

when would it be?

It would be exactly this time period

because this is...

I believe this is when we started

to look like us, um,

and when we, uh,

as a species, um, started.

And so, this is before we became...

we acquired different skin colors.

This is before we acquired

different languages

and we spread across

different geographies.

So, this is where I want to be,

right at the root.

So, I would love to express my...

uh, my fascination to this ground

by kissing it.

And here I go.

Professor Tim White of

the University of California, Berkeley,

leads the team here.

We were immediately captivated

by his wild style of explaining things.

So, look at the...

powder.

It blows in the wind,

it's very fine grain,

it's all floodplain, it's all silt.

But it all started as volcanic rock

from the highlands,

from the rift margin,

ground up over millions of years,

distributed out here,

and redistributed by the Awash River.

If you die today,

your body will decompose

on the floodplain.

If the hyenas don't chew

all the bones up,

the next time the river floods,

this soft, silty material

will be carried in,

and it will encase your bones.

Let's go.

Oh, we're gonna call this

the Werner Herzog Highway.

And what we're doing here

is opening up a space for the cars...

so we can come through

with a full crew tomorrow morning...

to recover the additional pieces

of the hominid

that we found just up on top there,

on the eroding sediments.

So, we'd like to pull the cars in

as close as we can get

so we can get all the equipment there.

And we'll start an extraction process

to pull that hominid out.

How phenomenally lucky are we

to have arrived now

and you've found

this 100,000-year-old human?

This does not happen very often.

These hominid fossils

are very, very rare.

Finding an artifact, that's easier,

because during any hominid's lifetime,

they can make dozens, thousands,

of stone-age calling cards

scattered all over the landscape.

But they only have one skeleton,

one dentition.

They only die once.

So, think about it.

Acres and acres of eroding sediment.

How in the world can we find the place

where this dead person's bones

came to rest

and arrive just at the geological moment

that erosion is carving

these sediments out,

exposing these ancient surfaces,

with the monkeys and the hippos

and everything else,

thousands of bones and artifacts

all over the surface?

And there's one guy,

one guy in the world.

If I had to say, "Get that guy out here

on the surface.

He's gonna find the hominid. "

You know who that is?

That is Kampiro Kayrento,

the world's greatest fossil finder.

Oh.

This is Kampiro Kayrento.

He is one of the world's experts,

if not the world's expert.

He's the guy I want on the aircraft

to find things.

He can recognize what's an antelope,

what's a carnivore,

what's a fish, what's a baboon,

what's a zebra,

what's a giraffe, what's a rhino.

He's got all that.

Not from the whole animal,

because you never find the whole animal.

You find pieces of animals,

pieces of the bones of animals.

He knows what they are.

You got anything, Tim?

More pieces for the puzzle.

Cranial vault piece,

freshly out of the ground.

That one needs to be squirted off.

This bone is beautifully preserved,

completely silicified,

completely fossilized.

So, we've got now

a number of different elements.

The most diagnostic and...

important one, ultimately,

will be this one here, which is...

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