John Piper at Blenheim Palace
Posted on | February 23, 2012 | No Comments
I was unfeasibly delighted when I heard that a number of paintings by John Piper (1903 to 1992) were to be shown at Blenheim Palace, just five miles from my home. My mum and step-father work there as guides so I had a guest pass to view the show.
Blenheim Palace by John Piper
Although John Piper is a giant of 20th century British art, you may not have heard of him. His work crops up in a few public collections, but there are many in private collections, like the Duke of Marlborough’s at Blenheim.
Piper’s creative output was astonishing. Not only did he paint, he also designed stained glass windows (notably the windows for the new Coventry Cathedral), made ceramics, tapestries, screen prints, etchings, drawings, and wrote and illustrated books, notably the Shell guides of the mid-20th century when he worked alongside poet John Betjeman.
Piper is primarily known as a painter of landscapes featuring architecture, palaces, monuments and churches. If this sounds a bit dull, don’t switch off, viewers; Piper’s magic lies in his free and spontaneous drawing – squiggles, daubs, lines and blocks – combined with glowing colour and the blackest blacks.
Stonehenge by John Piper (this is not in the exhibition)
And he’s wildly, bravely experimental, but not in a ‘hey-let’s-put-a-shark-in-a tank’ kind of way. He’ll mix watercolours, inks, oils and wax resist on the same sheet and make a compostion that sings and resonates. And he makes it look so very easy.
If you fancy a day out in Oxfordshire this spring you could do worse than check out Piper’s pictures at beautiful Blenheim Palace. The Palace is bright yellow and breath-takingly lovely. And it’s chock-full of really interesting stuff. I particularly like the freaky eyes painted high on the ceiling of the porch. Loveliest of all though is the parkland designed by Capability Brown. OMG that’s nice. No wonder Piper liked it here.
The exhibition runs until 9 April 2012.
Near Middlemill (this is not in the exhibition)
Map of Stratford-upon-Avon
Posted on | February 14, 2012 | 4 Comments
Stratford-upon-Avon is the birthplace of the English language’s most famous son: William Shakespeare. I too was born and raised in Stratford and I have just finished drawing a map of the town; it’s my love letter to the place that shaped me and that will forever be home.
“I like this place and willingly could spend time in it” - William Shakespeare in As you Like It
I have spent many hours these past 18 months drawing by hand maps of the places I have lived and love: Avebury, Eynsham, Stanton Harcourt and Woodstock. It was inevitable that I would turn my pen towards Stratford.
When I was a girl I didn’t know how lucky I was to grow up in Stratford. I now appreciate the extraordinary legacy it left me: a deep sense of history, culture and community. I wanted to put all that in my map.
The map shows not just the shape of the town and its buildings and roads, but also things you normally wouldn’t see on a map: history, nature, trees, birds, activities and lots of Shakespearean characters and quotes.
Stratford has so many stories to tell and this is my story. If you’re a Stratfordian, I hope you will forgive my omissions and that the map will delight you anyway; whether you’re a resident or now living in exile like me!
See more details of the map as it progressed.
Get your copy!
Copies of the map
are now available. Maps are A2 size (420 x 594 mm / 16.5 x 23.4 ins) and you can get them:
-FOLDED in a lovely colour cover for £4.99 + P&P
-FLAT, suitable for framing and signed by the artist for £12.99 each + P&P
Stocks are limited, so grab yours today.Get one from my shop or Email me now if you’d like to pay by bank transfer or if you prefer to usePayPal. Maps will be posted when funds have cleared.
In the news!
9 February 2012: Amazing drawn map of town a labour of love in the Stratford Observer
13 February 2012: Artist maps out her love of Stratford Herald in the Stratford Herald
The death of Captain James Cook – 14 February 1779
Posted on | February 14, 2012 | No Comments
“Do just once what others say you can’t do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.”
Whatever you may think about British colonial expansion, its impact and subsequent noxious effects, you have to admire the bravery, spirit and ambition of farm labourer’s son Captain James Cook. When he sailed away from Blighty in the 18th century it was as risky and as pioneering a thing to do as Gagarin’s first space flight in the 20th.
Born on 7 November 1728 in Yorkshire, aged 17 James became an apprentice on the small ships that sailed up and down the north east coast of England trading coal. He applied himself diligently to both the back-breaking, git-hard physical duties as well as the complex mathematical, cartographic and astronomical skills he would need to one day take charge of a ship.
In 1755 he enlisted in the Royal Navy, which was gearing up for the Seven Years War. He realised it would be the fastest way to progress in his career, and he rose quickly through the ranks. He displayed a dazzling talent for surveying, and charted the coast of Canada in maps which were still being used in the 20th century. At a time when accurate, reliable charts were few, this skill was as valuable as gold. It didn’t go unnoticed.
In 1768 he was asked by the Royal Society to sail the HMS Endeavour to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus across the sun. The data Cook recorded would assist with calculating longitude as well as expanding scientific knowledge. Cook also had a secret mission, contained in sealed orders to be opened only after the Tahiti mission was accomplished. He was to search for the mysterious Great Southern Land, Terra Australis. Sailors knew there was something down under but what was it? Where was it? Who lived there?
When Cook sailed away from England on what would be his first round-the-world trip, the Pacific Ocean was largely uncharted and he’d have to make it up as he went along, as well as try to keep alive all 90 of the ship’s company, which included botanist Joseph Banks. After eight months they reached Tahiti and established friendly relations with the local people. Then he sailed south west with a Tahitian guide, Tupaia, and in October 1769 reached New Zealand, only the second group of Europeans to do so. But friendly relations with the warlike Maori proved difficult, despite Tupaia’s ability to communicate with them.
Cook set about mapping the islands’ coastline, correctly observing the passage between the islands, now known as the Cook Strait. In less than six months he mapped 2,400 miles of New Zealand’s coast. The discovery was a great achievement, but it wasn’t the fabled Great Southern Continent he’d hoped for. He would have to sail on.
In April 1770, Cook’s party landed on the east coast of Australia, the first Europeans to do so. The currents and winds forced him to sail north and in doing so he was able to map most of the east coast of the continent naming places as he went: Botany Bay, Sydney Cove, Cape Tribulation and giving the whole lot the name New South Wales and claiming it for England. He returned to England in July 1771. The first voyage of discovery had taken three years.
There would be two more voyages of discovery. The second, in HMS Resolution, would take him south into the Antarctic circle for the first time and to claim South Georgia, and then into the Pacific once more to chart the Friendlies, Easter and Norfolk Islands. The third, in HMS Discovery, would take him on a quest to reveal the Northwest Passage and lead him up the west coast of America to the Bering Straits and finally, finally Hawaii.
For the most part Cook was firm but fair. He treated his crew justly and they always shared rations, his officers enjoyed no special privileges. He knew about ship-borne diseases and did what he could to feed his crew on fresh provisions caught or bartered for locally. He traded nails, cloth and other useful trinkets with local people for chickens, fruit and coconuts. Eating fresh local food, he observed, kept the scourge of scurvy at bay. Of course he didn’t know why; vitamin C was not isolated and explained until 1931. He was a stickler for hygiene and insisted that his men wash both themselves and the ship frequently. His actions would keep most of his crew in good health.
James Cook is a difficult man to get to know. His extensive journals reveal a man walking on a knife edge, trying to navigate a delicate balance between doing his job efficiently, self-preservation, the discipline and wellbeing of his crew, extreme patience, painstaking exactitude but also shortness of temper.
Among his tasks on his voyages was to “to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives” and to “endeavour, by all proper means to cultivate a friendship with the Natives.” In a world where white European attitudes of cultural and racial superiority ruled the waves, Cook stands out as enlightened. I think he remembered he was son of a farm labourer and saw that the natives he met were no different to the natives back home working the land. For example, in 1697 William Dampier noted of the aboriginal people he met: “The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world… setting aside their Human Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.” But Cook describes the cultural practices of the people he encountered with respect and thoughtfulness: “they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans…. In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them…this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.” To Cook, these are not ignorant savages, they are immensely practical and sensible. Today’s ugly consumer society still has this priceless lesson to learn.
Cook knew the impact the arrival of his ship would have on the small communities he encountered. He was acutely aware of the impact of European diseases – especially sexually transmitted infections – and would flog any of his crew who shagged local women. Many communities had already had other explorers visit and been raided and violated by them. No wonder they were wary. Although Cook took pains to forge polite, friendly relationships where others had not, he was nevertheless an intruder and meetings on those sun-kissed, palm-fringed beaches were often tense or ended in violence or death.
And so it was when he dropped anchor in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii for a second time on 14 February 1779. Cook’s previous visit had gone well and he forged friendly relations with the Polynesians. But there was a skirmish on the beach. Cook’s head was smashed and he was stabbed to death as he lay in the surf.
Undoubtedly Captain James Cook quite literally redrew the map of our fabulous world. But his achievements go further than mere cartography. Observations made on his voyages would lay the foundations of quite new ways of understanding the world and everything in it: oceanography, astronomy, anthropology, ethnography, botany, zoology. He may have been the first European to set foot in many new lands, but he was long dead by the time British policy was to exploit, dispossess and disrespect the extraordinary people and places he discovered.
Captain Cook: brave scientist; fearless explorer; gifted cartographer; and health obsessive or flag-waving, ruthless expansionist; bullying coloniser; spreader of disease and the scourge of alcohol to native peoples. You decide.
This article also appears on Dorian Cope’s blog On This Deity.
The death of Carl Linnaeus – 10 February 1778
Posted on | February 10, 2012 | 1 Comment
This article also appears on Dorian Cope’s blog On This Deity.
The Bible, Genesis 2:20, states: “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field”. But actually it wasn’t Adam. It was a Swedish botanist: Carl Linnaeus.
My dad was also a botanist, so since I was knee high to an orthoptera, I was aware that everything had a difficult-to-pronounce Latin name as well as its common or local name. I knew all about the splendid bulk of Sequoiadendron giganteum and the dangers of Toxicodendron radicans. But what I really wanted to do was to go to the ocean and watch the Zalophus californianus basking on the rocks.
At school, young Carl Linnaeus learned Latin, Greek, theology and maths, but he wasn’t interested in that stuffy nonsense (although it would come in very useful later in his life) all he wanted to do was go outside and look for plants. Fortunately his teachers recognised his gift for science and his studies re-focused on medicine and botany at the universities of Lund and Uppsala. In 1729, aged just 22, he published a thesis on plant sexuality and began lecturing to other students. It was going to be a brilliant career.
In 1732 he made a six-month long expedition to Lappland to study the biodiversity of the region. It would be there when stuggling to name the 100 new species of plants, mosses and lichens he identified, that the idea first came to him of simplifying the existing cumbersome system of classifying and naming living things. In Flora Lapponica, he applied his taxonomic system for the first time and realised it was so flexible and yet so specific, it could be extended to other living organisms.
There are two parts to his system, classification and naming.
Consider the zebra. We say zebra, but to Swahili-speakers all stripey horses are punda milia. But do we mean the mountain zebra, the plains zebra or Grevy’s? The Linnaean system makes classification very clear.
- Kingdom: Animalia – an animal
- Phylum: Chordata– an animal with a backbone
- Class: Mammalia – an animal with a backbone that feeds its young on milk
- Order: Perissodactyla - an animal with a backbone that feeds its young on milk that has a hoof with an odd number of toes; this branch in the tree of life includes horses, rhinos, and tapirs
- Family: Equidae – the horse family
- Genus: Equus quagga – this is the plains zebra
It’s name, Equus quagga, is specific to that species alone. As with all science, things are fluid; a species’ classification is debated and revised as new data is revealed.
Which brings me to names. Consider the springtime roadside herb with crowns of white lacy flowers I know as keck. But you might call it cow parsley, Queen Anne’s Lace or wild chervil. And if you’re French you might know it as anthrisque sauvage or cerfeuil des bois. Confusing, isn’t it? As he travelled, studied and met other botanists, Linnaeus realised each species needed a universal name. He adopted a system of nomenclature only partially developed by 16th century Swiss botanist, Caspar Bauhin, which he refined and popularised into a name consisting of two Latin words. Keck became Anthriscus sylvestris.
A glorious by-product of Latin names is that they often have an innate poetic beauty and history of their own. The humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae translates as ‘New England big wing’. While the giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis comes from the Arabic ziraafa combined with a description: tall like a camel and spotty like a leopard.
Linnaeus’ first published his system, Systema Naturae, in 11 pages in 1735. Such was its popularity that by 1768 it was in its twelfth edition and ran to 2,400 pages. The system was soon adopted by the new breed of naturalists including Captain James Cook’s expedition naturalist Joseph Banks.
So why was a system of putting species into groups and giving them universal names so important?
Species can look very different from each other and live far apart and yet still be related (the kiwi and the ostrich). Or they may have evolved similar features because of the way they feed (the thylacine and the wolf). A classification system gives scientists a logical framework based on anatomy and physiology on which they can work to reveal the truth. And without universal names how could scientists all over the world study species unambiguously and meaningfully?
Linnaeus’ classification system enabled him to think about food-chains and the interdependence of life. It wasn’t until Darwin that the complex and beautiful tree of life would begin to be explored in more detail. It would even help shed light on our own origins.
The death of Johannes Gutenberg – 3 February 1468
Posted on | February 3, 2012 | No Comments
Where would humanity be without the stone axe, the wheel, the plough, the compass and the steam engine? Likewise the printing press, whose inventor Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg died on this day in 1468.
“Yes but” I hear you bookish pedants cry, “didn’t the Chinese T’ang Dynasty have a method of printing from carved wooden blocks?” Indeed they did, but its efficiency was limited. Wood blocks are fiddly to make, can only be used for one edition, will not take corrections, and degrade quickly.
Before Gutenberg books were an eye-wateringly expensive item. Each book took scribes months to produce. They hand-copied the text with quill pens using inks they made from gum, ox gall, soot and water onto sheets of parchment, an expensive product in its own right made usually from calf skin.
No wonder there were so few books and those that there were, were bibles; the only words worthy enough to commit to parchment. Most ordinary people had only ever seen one book – the bible in their parish church.
By the end of the 14th century there was a quiet unsung revolution going on; a water-powered method for making wood pulp-based paper had been developed. (Hence ‘paper mill’, since they were usually located on a river to power the process and provide the water.) Large quantities of uniform quality sheets were being produced cheaply.
Gutenberg was born sometime in the very late 1300s and worked in his native Mainz, Germany as a blacksmith and goldsmith. With his fine metalworking skills he developed his greatest gift to the world: moveable metal type. This he combined the traditional screw press (a Roman invention) to make durable, flexible and speedy printing equipment.
He cast tens of thousands of tiny individual metal letters in an alloy he devised of antimony, lead and tin. The letters could be ‘set’ to make words, sentences, pages, chapters, books, volumes! Initially fiddly to make and cast, yes, but they could be used again and again with no degradation. Letters were set by skilled compositors, inked and pressed onto paper. But wait: pre-existing inks were water-based and did not adhere to the type. No problem for our hero. Gutenberg set about inventing an oil-based ink, sticky like varnish, which would produce a crisp letterform on the paper.
All the elements were now in place to herald a revolution.
Gutenberg’s best known masterpiece is his 42 line bible, first sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair. Although it was an expensive two-volume affair, it caused a sensation. He wanted to keep his invention a secret, but the cat was out of the bag and by the end of the century more than 2,500 printing presses were hard at work throughout Europe. The public appetite for printed material proved, then as now, insatiable.
The first books were religious, but it didn’t take long for printers to branch out into classic literary texts, scholarly works, manuals, pattern books, story books. As more were published, books became cheaper, literacy increased and people sought entertainment. Just 23 years after Gutenberg’s bible, the first English printer, William Caxton, published Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. For the first time, English readers could read in their own language the exploits of characters they recognised from everyday life: the Miller, the Squire and the Wife of Bath.
Similarly, in Italy in 1472 Dante’s epic poem the Divine Comedy was published and helped to fix the Tuscan dialect as ‘Italian’, even though 14th century Dante considered himself a speaker of Latin. Books introduced the notion of spelling, helped to stabilise and standardise languages which in turn gave rise to a sense of nationalism.
Most importantly of all, the press had the power to spread ideas and information accurately. Scientific, cultural, technical, artistic, religious and political ideas could be shared and debated by many. The works of great philosophers such as Martin Luther and humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam could inform people, and for the first time almost gave them permission to think for themselves, armed with the information to make up their own minds. Governments and institutions couldn’t easily hide behind propaganda and self-serving lies anymore – although many still try.
As words became attributable authorship became important. Copyright laws were established to protect intellectual property. Reputations and fortunes were made. They still are.
Newssheets took a little longer to get going. In gossipy Venice a cheap newssheet costing one gazeta (hence Gazette) was circulated in the early 1500s, but it wasn’t until 1605 that what is widely regarded as the world’s first newspaper was published in Strasbourg with the least catchy title ever: Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien.
In 1900, author Mark Twain wrote: “The world concedes without hesitation or dispute that Gutenberg’s invention is incomparably the mightiest event that has ever happened … Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg’s invention has made it: for from that source it has all come … the evil wrought through his mighty invention is immeasurably outbalanced by the good it has brought …”
100 years since Scott reaches South Pole
Posted on | January 17, 2012 | 2 Comments
The stories of the early polar explorers are some of the most inspirational and moving tales that I know. And so I couldn’t let the day go by without noting that it was one hundred years ago today, that this photo was taken of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his men at the South Pole.
Pictured, left to right: standing Lawrence Oates, Captain Scott, Edgar Evans and seated Henry Bowers and Edward Wilson. Bowers took the photo, using a length of string to operate the camera shutter.
Instead of the glorious triumph they had hoped for, they arrived at the Pole only to discover that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team had beaten them to it by less than a month. Amundsen had arrived there on 14 December 1911. “Great God! This is an awful place”, Scott wrote in his diary.
The return journey was a disaster. Evans died on 17 February 1912 from starvation and frostbite at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. On 17 March 1912 Lawrence Oates who was suffering with appallingly frostbitten feet, stepped out of the tent and into a blizzard, knowingly sacrificing himself to save the other three. According to Scott he said: “I am just going outside and I may be some time.” But Wilson, Bowers and Scott died anyway – of cold and hunger – trapped in a tent by an unseasonal blizzard just 11 miles from their life-saving depot in late March.
I shall write a longer piece about Captain Scott to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death on 29 March 2012.
My favourite things
Posted on | December 21, 2011 | No Comments
I began painting My favourite things last January and it has been hanging around waiting for me to complete it ever since. I finally managed it yesterday. It’s very simple picture really: an A to Z of some of the things I love best in the world from aardvark to zebra.
Before I painted in the background I photographed some of the details. Here’s D for dolphin, with a bit of C for chipmunk and I for impala:
And who wouldn’t be pleased to see a G for giraffe up close and personal as I did almost two years ago in Kenya? It’s not only their long eyelashes and reticulated markings that I love, it’s their extraordinary evolution; on the very edge of what’s possible for an antelope.
The eyes of an O for owl – another evolutionary triumph.
This detail shows the poor old Q for quagga, now extinct; an R for raccoon, those great opportunists; and a V for viscacha, a South American mountain-dwelling, rock-hopping, ludicrously cute social rodent.
And finally a pretty little F for frog. What’s not to love?
The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi – 17 December 2010
Posted on | December 17, 2011 | No Comments
What a magic carpet ride it’s been this past year for our brothers and sisters in North Africa and the Middle East. Egypt’s Mubarak-led police state deposed, Libya’s mad dog Gaddafi fittingly gunned down in a sewer. And the struggle continues for reform in Bahrain, Yemenis fight for their rights, and brave and bullied Syrians continue to rise up against the barbarism of Bashar al-Assad’s evil regime.
The so-called Arab Spring signals such hope for the future! And it was sprung on this day last year when a young fruit-vendor immolated himself on the streets of a small rural town in central Tunisia.
Born in 1984 to a working class family, Mohamed Bouazizi became the sole provider for his family at the age of 10. Honest, hard-working, responsible, he was a young man that any family would be proud of. Everyday he would buy fresh produce with what little money the family had, wheel his wooden barrow a mile to the souk and resell the fruit and veg for to make just enough dinars to support his mother, younger brothers and sisters, his uncle, and his sister at university. With unemployment rampant, he was glad to have any work at all.
Since he was a boy he’d been repeatedly harassed and bullied by municipal officials, with no recourse to the law. Tunisia’s government, run for 23 years by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was corrupt to the core. Local police would knock over his barrow, extort money, steal his fruit, or fine him for not having the ‘correct’ market permit.
In the morning of 17 December 2010, a policewoman confronted Bouazizi as he made his way to market. She wanted to confiscate his scales but he was having none of it. The policewoman slapped and spat at him, shouted insults and forced him to the ground. Her colleagues beat him. He was humiliated and could take no more abuse.
He ran to the governor’s office to complain about his treatment, but no one would see him. He shouted: ‘If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself’. An hour later, Bouazizi stood outside the governor’s office, poured petrol over himself, called out “how do you expect me to make a living?”and struck a match.
Local people ran to help, the flames were put out and he survived – just – but suffered appalling burns to 90% of his body. He would never recover consciousness. He was taken to the local hospital and later transferred to a larger burns unit in Sfax.
Bouazizi’s family, friends and neighbours staged a small protest in the town at the way their son had been treated. Such dissent was not tolerated in Tunisia, and would almost certainly lead to arrest or beating. But they’d all had enough. Many of the young people protesting recognised in themselves the desperation Bouazizi felt, but this time they had a secret weapon: the internet. Armed with mobile phones and wi-fi, they filmed the protests and uploaded them to YouTube and Facebook. Video clips spread virally and were soon broadcast by influential international satellite news channels such as Al Jazeera. The outcry was deafening.
Tunisian forces tried in vain to silence the protest but the genie was out of the bottle. Twenty-six-year-old Bouazizi died of his injuries on 4 January 2011 a martyr and inspiration to the Arabic-speaking world. Ten days later on 14 January 2011 Ben Ali stepped down and escaped to Saudi Arabia.
Inspired by the shining Tunisian example, people in other countries – not just young people but ALL people – felt the same frustrations. Protest became a popular uprising with Friday prayers as the rallying point. Next stop Tahrir Square, Cairo. Arabian nights would never be the same.
The death of Mary Leakey – 9 December 1996
Posted on | December 9, 2011 | No Comments
This article also appears on Dorian Cope’s blog On This Deity.
No matter who we are and what we think, the beautiful truth is that we are all children of Africa. It was in no small part the painstaking work of Mary Leakey that revealed this. For more than 50 years under hot African skies, archaeologist Mary grubbed around in the earth searching doggedly for clues that would reveal the truth about human physical and cultural evolution. And, man, did she find them.
Born in London on 6 February 1913, Mary herself confessed to being rubbish at school; she couldn’t even pass exams in French, in which she was fluent having spent much of her childhood in France. Aged 12 her passion for prehistory was ignited when in the Dordogne, she was wowed by cave paintings. Unqualified in anything and unable to get into university, she had only a talent for drawing and an insatiable curiosity in prehistory. Unregistered, she attended university archaeology lectures and joined various archaeological digs.
“I dug things up. I was curious, and I liked to draw what I found” she later said.
Her illustrations would lead to her meeting and falling for archaeologist Louis Leakey. In 1936, after Louis’ messy divorce, they finally married and had three sons, Jonathan, Richard and Philip, all of who would make their mark in the field of archaeology. But it was not to be the easiest of marriages. Louis was a womaniser and basked in self-publicity.
It was Mary and Louis’ discoveries in East Africa which made the Leakey name synonymous with hominoid archaeology. She fell in love with Africa, loved living in tents, and at various excavations in Kenya and Tanzania, she simultaneously raised her sons, kept a pack of dogs (her favourites were Dalmations), smoked cigars, quaffed single malt and dug and dug and dug and dug.
At Olorgesailie, near Nairobi, she unearthed numerous handaxes and fossils and realised that she had found a place where early hominids had actually once lived and thrived 100,000 to two million years ago. She was on to something. Each new find, publicised by Louis with lectures, broadcasts and after-dinner speeches, seemed to be proving that East Africa was indeed the cradle of humanity. Mary’s methodical evidence-gathering, her scientific cataloguing, report-writing and sheer bloody hard work backed-up all Louis’ flashy raconteuse.
Her spectacular finds include: the skull of Proconsul africanus, a fossil ape; a 1.8 million-year-old skull of Australopithecus boisei, the so-called nutcracker man because of his huge teeth and jaws, and the bones of Homo habilis surrounded by stone tools. Reconstructing the bones, she revealed that Homo habilis was dextrous and had a brain big enough to make and use tools. It was a sensation and blew out of the water any theories that the origins of modern humans were to be found in Asia.
From 1968 until Louis’ death in 1972, Mary and Louis lived separate lives. He loved celebrity lecture tours and fundraising, while she loved only digging at Olduvai in Tanzania, which had by this time become her home, as it was to so many of our human ancestors. Mary had worked most of her life in Louis’s shadow but her most remarkable discovery came in 1978 when her team spotted, quite by chance, what she thought might be footprints of a human ancestor.
And so on 2 August 1978, on hands and knees, Mary spent hours with a paintbrush and toothpick to carefully reveal the well-preserved imprints of heel, toes and arch. Exposed by erosion, she deduced that the tracks had been made by an early bipedal hominid. She stood up, lit a fine Havana and declared: ”Now this really is something to put on the mantelpiece!”
The trail of footprints went for 75 feet. Two or three people had walked here 3.7 million years ago; a large one, perhaps male, a smaller one, maybe female and a tiny one, possibly their child. Like a bushman tracker, she read the prints and noted that at some point the female had stopped and turned before continuing. Perhaps she sensed a lurking predator or heard a thunderclap? The footprints remain the earliest known traces of human behaviour and they established that hominids were walking upright far earlier than previously supposed.
”This motion, so intensely human, transcends time” Mrs. Leakey wrote, ”a remote ancestor – just as you or I – experienced a moment of doubt.”
The story of how we Homo sapiens evolved is still being drafted by scientists. It’s a long story, but there is no doubt that Mary wrote the first chapter. We dig you, Mary.
Easter Island stoneheads
Posted on | December 3, 2011 | No Comments
A lifetime’s ambition was achieved last month when Moth and I visited Easter Island, the most isolated inhabited place on the planet, rightly famous for its giant stone sculptures. It was a joy to sit and sketch them.
On this page of my sketchbook, I drew in the bougainvillea garland I was presented with when we arrived on the island.
The monument at Tongariki features 15 moai all in a row – here are just nine of them – my paper wasn’t big enough (nor did we have enough time) to paint all 15.
At the far south west of island, lies the islet ot Motu Nui, the focus of the birdman cult.
There are more sketches of Easter Island on my Facebook page (you don’t have to be a Facebook user to see them). And here are some of our photos of the different sites on Easter.
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