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 ofThe 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 anthr