Well, when I was in seventh grade I had a teacher who showed
a lot of films. And he showed us one of those really old black
and white films of Louis and Mary Leakey looking for fossils
in East Africa, and they were working at Olduvai Gorge. And I
always had an interest in Africa, always felt like I
wanted to do something there. And I had an interest in fossils
and dinosaurs and the past. So the combination of Africa and
human origins really inspired me. So ever since seventh grade
I wanted to do this.
I had a very inspiring student teacher in school. And I can't
remember what grade it was. But I remember it was when we were
doing ancient history, and he was teaching the Battle of
Thermopylae, where the Spartans face off against the Persian
Army. And he came in in full Greek Hoplite Regalia- that's
the Greek infantryman. And he was a teacher that inspired me.
And when I spoke- I used to talk to him a lot. And I played chess
with him sometimes after school. And he used to say that
the thing that you needed to do to be a good scholar, to get
where he was- and he was doing student teaching, but he was
also doing a PhD- is that you had to accept the fact that to
be excellent at it, 95% of it's going to be hard work, and the
other 5% is going to be fun. And to get to the fun you have to
gut it through the 95%. And I took that advice and accepted
it. And that's paid off.
I guess if you could call this an experiment, I used to love to
catch hornets and wasps and put them in a jar and let them
fight. And I guess that's an experiment because you get to
see them at close range, and you get to see how they interact.
And I know that's a little strange, but I would say that
was probably the first experiment. But of course I had,
you know, the things where I set up the volcanoes and tried
to get them to explode and that sort of thing.
Wow, there's a lot of great stuff about being a scientist.
You get to work with people who are really smart and really
excited about what they do. That's a wonderful part about
it. Being a scientist at a university, you get to work with
young people who are constantly having new ideas and constantly
pushing forward and keeping me fresh, intellectually. So that's
great. The excitement of discovery is hard to describe
because it's very hard to find discovery in other ways, other
things in life. When you find something new, and you know it's
new, it's a new finding, it moves the ball forward- jerks
the ball forward in a significant way. That's so
exciting, and we- most of science, you know, 99% of
science, you inch the ball forward. And that's good, and we
get up every day and we're excited to do that. And then
every once in a while you have the big discovery and that jerks
the ball forward. And that really has an inspiring aspect
to it.
I would say you have to have very high ethics because science
is self-correcting, and we don't have police force. So you have
to have a very high ethical standard to make sure that the
science you do is right, every I is dotted, and it's correct, and
you teach a commitment to ethics to the people around you. So
that's important. You have to have a self-motivating work
ethic. You have to be able to sit in a room by yourself and
work through problems. And then you have to be able to take
criticism and understand that you can be wrong. And that the
ideas that you come up with, and the hypotheses that you put
forward, are not about you. It's not about your personality or
your character. It's about getting it right. So I think
there's a range of things you have to have as a package, and I
think those are important.
I think there's, virtually every science has societal benefits.
And they go beyond the fact that people are just interested in
what we do. In my field, human origins, we have a lot of
interest, just public interest. People want to know about it.
And that's fine, and that's good. But I think unraveling how
humans became this super unique species. We were- a colleague of
mine, Kim Hill, defines us as the unique outlier species.
We're like nothing else on the planet today. And how that came
about, I think, has real impacts on understanding humans. And to
give you an idea, you know, ten years ago if I mentioned Omega-3
fatty acids, everybody would look at you and, puzzlement,
they wouldn't know what that is. Everybody is talking about
it now. And we know that Omega-3 fatty acids are essential for
cognitive development among children, that everybody on the
planet should be having high amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids
in their diet. And it's because our body doesn't produce them.
Well, why is it that if they're so essential to us, our body
doesn't produce them? Where do we get them in the food chain?
Well, the best place to get them in the food chain is the coastal
diet. It's the marine diet- shellfish and fish is where they
are. And they're very rare in the terrestrial diet. And what
we're starting to learn from the paleoanthropological
record is that it's quite possible that the origin
population of all modern humans arose in a coastal context.
And what that meant was that at the origin point, we were
bathed in a diet very high in Omega-3 fatty acids, which would
then release the need for our body to produce them. So our
origin point and our need for a high-quality diet come together.
And paleoanthropology, perhaps, explains why that's the case.
There's been a couple of people, and I think, going back to the
idea of, how do you be a good scientist, one of the things is
that even when you get to my age- I'm 50- you still have to
make sure that you're listening to the right people and
learning. So as I was an undergraduate, there was a
professor, William Sanders- Bill Sanders- who actually works on
Mexican complex societies. He was very demanding, and I worked
very hard to impress him. And what he taught me was, is that
in order to learn about human societies in the past, you
needed to know a lot about the environment, and you needed to
know a lot about comparative ethnography, which is the
anthropology of modern people. And those two things he taught
me, and I stuck to that message. When I got to be a graduate
student, Desmond Clark was my PhD advisor. He's widely
considered kind of the father of African archaeology. And
the things that Desmond constantly hammered away
is that you had to be active in the field. So in other words,
do field work. Because we need to increase the quality of the
database we have. And he said you have to make sure you know
the data. He wasn't a theory person. But data was crucial. So
that was an important part of the package. And more recently,
I just mentioned Kim Hill a couple minutes ago. We hired a
guy named Kim Hill who's a hunter-gatherer ethnographer,
worked with the Aicha- hunter-gatherers in South
America. And he brought, when he came to ASU we spent a lot of
time talking. He has a theoretical perspective on
trying to explain how humans became this unique species. And
that's helped me contextualize my paleoanthropological work.
And so I feel like in the last few years I've grown
intellectually from that as well. And I look forward in the
future to meeting new colleagues who can help me
grow in other directions.
How scientific it is. A lot of people, when they ask, well how
do you know something is 1.2-million years old, or how do
you know that an animal, a fossil-animal tended to eat this
kind of grass versus that kind of grass, we rely on the same
scientific techniques that turn the lights on in the house and
create the nuclear power, and send astronauts into outer
space. All of our data is reliant on those same
techniques. And so we, our work rests on the shoulders of the
physicists and the chemists and the geoscientists, and in many
ways paleoanthropology is a natural trans-disciplinary
science. We are scavengers of other peoples' methods and
techniques.
I don't have many things in my office. I keep it rather spare.
But we had a paper that was published in Nature last year.
And the senior author on the paper printed a beautiful copy
of the cover. We made the cover. And he had it framed and sent to
me. And that was pretty meaningful. So I think I'd
probably grab that.
I like rock and roll. And I vary widely in my tastes. When I was
in college I was a big Grateful Dead fan. And then I got into
the blues, particularly traditional blues, acoustic,
that sort of thing. I play a little guitar. And more recently
I've gravitated toward hard rock. And so recently I've been
listening to Rush.