The Wisdom of the Bones
by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman
Summary
In 1984, on the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a member of Richard Leakey's team spotted a matchbook sized piece of skull in the lag gravel, and the excavation it started produced the find of a lifetime: the Nariokotome boy, a nearly complete skeleton of Homo erectus, a youth who died at the edge of a marsh one and a half million years ago. Fossil humans are usually a jaw here and a kneecap there; a skeleton is a biography, and this book is Walker's account, written with Shipman, of reading it.
The first half is the dig itself, sieving tons of sediment for years, the bones assembling season by season, told with the field's texture, heat, tents, hippo tracks through the site. The second half is the interrogation, and it is a masterclass in how much a skeleton will answer if you know how to ask. The boy's height and growth curves, tall, strikingly modern from the neck down, built for striding across open country. The pelvis and what it implies about brains at birth. The vertebrae, whose narrow neural canal becomes the book's boldest inference: not enough nerve supply for the breath control that speech demands, a walker, not yet a talker. The teeth that date his death in early adolescence, and the diseased jaw that may explain it.
Around three hundred pages, science and campfire in the right proportions.
Best for readers who want one great fossil made to yield everything it knows, by the man who led the work.
Historical Context & Significance
The Wisdom of the Bones won the Science Book Prize in 1997, and it stands as the insider companion to the outsider book the prize honoured eight years earlier: where Lewin's Bones of Contention anatomised paleoanthropology's quarrels from the press seats, this is the view from inside the trench, by one of the great fossil anatomists.
Alan Walker, a Leakey collaborator across decades and the field's acknowledged master of functional anatomy, wrote it with Pat Shipman, an anthropologist and science writer, and his wife, a partnership that later produced The Ape in the Tree, their account of the Proconsul fossils. The Nariokotome skeleton itself, formally KNM-WT 15000, remains the most complete early Homo erectus ever found and the anchor of what the species means: the body plan going fully human long before the mind's full kit, the conclusion this book argued from the vertebrae, has been debated and refined since, exactly as the authors expected.
Walker died in 2017, his boy still the yardstick for what early Homo looked like and how it grew.