Our first day’s walk would take us east across an uplifted finger of land called the Bouri Peninsula, toward the Afar village of Herto. We emerged from the shade of the lake fringe and crossed some low, gray sand dunes. Soon an Afar boy and girl came with their herd of goats to investigate. The Afar are pastoralists, and except for the addition of firearms, their lives today are not substantially different from the way they were 500 years ago. As we walked in the heat among the gently bleating animals, it was easy to imagine historical time rushing backward with every step.We approached the grass-covered huts and thornbush stockades of Herto. Asfaw, the affable former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, pointed beneath my feet. Careful where you step, he said. All around me, pieces of a fossil hippo skull were eroding out of the yellowish, pebbly sand. Nearby rested a teardrop-shaped stone tool, roughly five inches end to end. The Afar people do not make stone tools. We had reached our first window into the past.In November 1997 the team was surveying where we now stood, just a couple hundred yards from the village, when one of its members spotted a fragment of a hominid skull Its location was marked with a yellow pin flag, and the team fanned out to search for more pieces Soon yellow flags sprouted like a field of flowers, concentrated in one spot in particular Embedded in the sand beneath was what turned out to be a remarkably complete human skull.
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