Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:03:35 +0000

Louis Leakey's "Primitive" Feminism

The Trimates tracked uncharted paths toward communities of apes that were little understood by anyone. One can only wonder what each was thinking; men, let alone women, hadn't spent the intense time they would observing animals in their native habitats. Local officials thought Goodall insane for having no male escorts; colleagues thought Fossey suicidal when she set up camp with no survival training; and Galdikas traveled to areas so remote that her reference guides had been written by turn-of-the-century explorers. Personnel at the Indonesian Embassy could not confirm whether people in her area continued to hunt heads or practice bone-cleansing ceremonies, but she proceeded anyway.22 Few women raised with the creature comforts of Western life would have surrendered to such unknowns. Their shared love of animals led the Trimates to water, but it was the charismatic Louis Leakey who convinced them to drink.

Like no other field scientist save Margaret Mead, Leakey captured the attention of the American public, with his news of exotic digs and prehistoric finds. By the time he met his lady primatologists, he was already a chubby white-haired man, easily mistaken for a retired weekend golfer rather than an Indiana Jones type who excavated sites throughout the world. It may sound grandiose to describe his life's work as the quest for the physical origins of humans, but that's truly what it was. He grew increasingly convinced that answers to his questions lay in the primates that continued to roam the earth, and he piqued the interest of American sponsors about the need to observe apes in their natural habitats.23

But Leakey's physical ailments prevented him from conducting the long-term study of apes he had in mind. He theorized that women should do this research, for he had long admired their abilities in the field. Women, he decided, read social cues and observed the nature around them differently from men. These abilities were not learned in school, he once told Goodall. University training served only to desensitize intuition, which was why he didn't recruit primatologists from academic faculties. "He wanted someone with a mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory," she recalled, ". . . someone with a sympathetic understanding of animals. I think his reasoning was that, if you look at human mothers, they've got to have patience to be successful. Secondly, any human female must have some kind of programming to be able to understand the wants, the needs of a small creature that can't speak. . . . And thirdly, women traditionally have been responsible for keeping peace within the family. . . . And all that means a lot of patience and ability to just watch for little nonverbal signs. So that may give one an edge on looking at very complex social behavior."24 Forty years later, Goodall remained convinced of his logic.

Leakey was a great admirer of women, though he rarely observed boundaries with them. Mary Leakey replaced his first wife after she, too, had been recruited for the field. They had three sons, and Louis's willingness to take on child-rearing responsibilities allowed Mary to dig for long stints of uninterrupted time. In 1948 she found a nearly intact skull of the extinct ape Proconsul, and she unearthed numbers of prehistoric tools and animals before discovering the jaw of Zinjanthropus, the "Nutcracker Man," in 1959. With Mary firmly ensconced at Olduvai, Leakey turned his attention to younger women who could carry out his primate studies in the field. Mary resented his exploits and believed his "primate ladies" were nothing more than dispensers of affirmation for a man sapped of virility. She had seen it all before.

Goodall was only twenty-three when she met Leakey, Fossey was thirty-one, Galdikas twenty-five. "He is so sweet, so utterly adorable," Goodall wrote in 1957, though he became less so as she continually rebuffed his romantic overtures. She was able ultimately to channel Leakey's feelings into father-like affection, but Fossey received love letters from him until his death in 1972. Galdikas thought his adolescent crushes harmless, even endearing. "Louis craved female attention and warmth," she explained. He truly loved women, "but it was 'women' in the collective more than the particular."25

Regardless of how one might judge him, Leakey's special fondness for women brought them to the field and propelled primatology into public consciousness. The social astuteness he observed in women had little to do with any stereotyped proclivity to make small talk at cocktail parties; it was an ability to notice the smallest details while assessing the larger community or system. He made this observation at the same time that David Botstein was noting similar powers in Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor. As a roomful of people listened to papers, she quietly observed and decided that Botstein must be hard of hearing. He asked her how on earth she could have known that, to which she told him that she noted his preference for sitting in the back row of the auditorium even though he was talkative. Given the acoustics of the room, she figured he must sit in the back to hear better.26 McClintock's perceptiveness in the lecture hall was what Leakey appreciated about women in the field. His litmus tests for choosing his researchers were brainteasers from popular magazines and a series of innocuous card games. Placing cards facedown on a coffee table, he asked Galdikas to tell him which cards were red and which were black. Although she couldn't tell him which were which, she noted that about half of them were bent and half were not. Leakey had bent the black ones, a detail noticed by his Lady Trimates but never by a man with scientific credentials. Women, he concluded, were better able to see details that did not yet appear important.27

Leakey believed not only that women were better observers, but also that they had more patience for such long-term studies as the ones he envisioned of primates. What required more commitment than nurturing lifelong relationships and rearing children into adulthood--feats that he assumed women accomplished more adeptly than men? He also expected that women would appear less threatening than men to the male-dominated ape communities they observed. His experiences had shown that men in the field would try to do what most had since the beginning of modern times: conquer nature and move on. Henry Nissen had observed chimpanzees in French Guinea only for two and a half months in the 1930s, and his was the longest study in the wild before Goodall's. George Schaller lasted a full year with the gorillas of Zaire, but then he moved on to lions and pandas. Fossey surpassed his logged hours within her first year in Africa, and Galdikas easily eclipsed R. K. Davenport's eleven months with orangutans in Malaysia. By 1975 she had surpassed John MacKinnon, who had logged more field hours than anyone in the world. When she wrote up her dissertation she had more than sixty-eight hundred hours of field observation to draw from.28

In the lab, scientists felt pressure to produce data quickly, to be in the vanguard of theoretical and technological advancement. In the field, however, slow and steady finished the race; persistence and dedication were key qualities. Leakey knew from the start that his Trimates were committed people, and he was careful about helping them prepare for the fieldwork. When he discussed the logistics of Fossey's study with her in 1966, for example, he warned her to remove her appendix ahead of time, since no one would be able to save her if it burst in the field. He was pleased to discover that she arranged for the surgery, undaunted by his warning. Similarly, in the interest of avoiding all medical emergencies, Galdikas agreed to have her tonsils removed if such action would get her to Borneo.29 She endured the initial years of physical discomfort and frustrating results, while her husband, Rod Brindamour, left, as Leakey predicted all men would. Although Brindamour had endured in Borneo for seven years, he couldn't help feeling like a "displaced housewife," with no career or paycheck of his own. He had been stripped of his virility in the Western sense. "Our divorce was as much a reflection of our culture and of the different ways Western men and women view the world," Galdikas later reflected:

The archetypal Western male, Rod went to Borneo in search of adventure. . . . He was the Marlboro Man with a mission, saving the forest and the orangutans. But when you have the same adventure day after day, the exhilaration and the feeling of triumph fade. After seven and a half years, Rod felt that the laws protecting orangutans were being enforced and the reserve boundaries were secure. The job was done and it was time to move on, time to go back to "real life." I went to Indonesia for so-called "female" reasons: I wanted to help. If I had to take risks, I did. But I wasn't interested in adventure for adventure's sake. My triumph came from feeling at one with the orangutans and the forest; I exulted in the peace and the quiet. Because I wasn't looking for thrills, I never got bored. The more I knew about orangutans, the more I would be able to learn. After seven and a half years I felt even more committed than when I arrived.30

Galdikas believed that her accomplishments could be attributed to maternal persistence, albeit socially conditioned, not biologically based. Leakey, however, believed that such persistence was as innate as a mother orang's when protecting her young. On the one hand, he opened doors for women to experience the exotic adventures of virile turn-of-the-century naturalists. On the other, he based his beliefs in women's natural proclivities as mothers and nurturers, and feminists who believed in "difference" came to agree with him in the 1980s. Perhaps he was enlightened in the Western sense, or simply non-Western altogether. One need only be reminded of his advice to Galdikas to understand the difference: She recalled that he approved of her practicing birth control in the field, but insisted that in his Kikuyu experience painful clitorectomy proved the surest form--it had deterred women from engaging in sexual activity for centuries.31

James Krasner argued, more skeptically, that Leakey's choice of women over men in the field was gimmick more than anything else: "Leakey no doubt understood that readers [of National Geographic] who would not be interested in evolutionary theory or animal behavior would be arrested by photographs of middle-class white women embracing apes."32 Regardless of motives to innovate or titillate, it's remarkable that Leakey acted to appoint women, given the potential risks at stake. What if his Trimates reported observations that the scientific establishment considered highly improbable? What if, in their propensities as feeling women, they committed the most heinous crime of all by growing attached to the animals?

In the end, most of the dire predictions came to pass. When Jane Goodall told the primatological community in 1960 that chimps were entirely habituated to her presence, it was more than most could swallow. That same year, leading expert Vernon Reynolds, who had just returned from Uganda, had concluded it couldn't be done. Before the 1950s primatologists caught no more than brief glimpses of the animals they studied; most refused to attempt habituation altogether, shooting the animals and studying their remains back in the lab. One need only know of the experiments performed in American labs to see how unorthodox Goodall appeared. Harry Harlow, a researcher of rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin, ironically designed artificial conditions in the late 1950s and early 1960s to elicit animals' most natural responses. To prove the importance of the mother-child bond, for instance, he isolated babies from the mothers to whom they instinctually clung in the wild, putting them in cages with "surrogate" parents made of terrycloth and wire or with no surrogates at all. He left monkeys alone, devoid of social interaction, in darkness in his "pit of despair" for six-week stints, to note the depression and dysfunctional behavior that resulted. Somehow his man-made experiments were supposed to provide more accurate truths than what Goodall humanely determined in the forest.33

Professional peers approved because the role of master controller was unquestioned in Western science. Goodall, the novice, knew no better than to proceed with a different approach, letting chimps grab food from her hand and wander into camp. "Ah-ha," her detractors exclaimed, "then her data must be tainted." Touching animals in the field was tantamount to spitting into urine samples in a biomedical lab. Goodall thought just the opposite. She blended in, wearing the drab colors of the forest and making no effort to interact with animals who didn't approach her first. She viewed her dealings with the chimps not as manipulative, but rather as being on their terms. A sympathetic colleague called Goodall's "a humble science": "She asks the animals to tell her about themselves." Others were less generous, at which point Leakey defended his protégée as a lion defends her cubs--or, as Goodall observed, as a mother chimp defended her babes.34

Fossey's habituation of mountain gorillas took much longer, and the awaited point of contact was too monumental for her to remain detached in the way field texts advised. "One of my first rules to visitors was 'Never touch the gorillas,'" she recalled. "This rule was occasionally broken once I learned how much gorillas loved to be tickled." Before long she belched with them, groomed their fur, and cuddled their infants like her own. Torn by heart and head, she rationalized her methods as a balance between "open" and "obscured" contacts: "Obscured contacts were especially valuable in revealing behavior that otherwise would have been inhibited by my presence. The drawback to this method was that it contributed nothing toward the habituation process. Open contacts, however, slowly helped me win the animals' acceptance. This was especially true when I learned that imitation of some of their ordinary activities such as scratching and feeding or copying their contentment vocalizations tended to put the animals at ease more rapidly than if I simply looked at them through binoculars in an attempt to disguise the potentially threatening glass eyes from the shy animals."35

In 1960 George Schaller had been the only researcher to glimpse mountain gorillas in their habitat; twenty years later Fossey compiled the most complete set of data in existence on wild gorillas. From nose print sketches; to spectrograms of vocalizations; to studies of diet, birthing patterns, and anatomical proportions, she left few stones unturned. Ian Redmond, her most devoted assistant, took on the unpleasant task of heading up a parasitological study, classifying and drawing the organisms found in gorilla stool samples. Colleagues approved of his empirical data but criticized Fossey's subjective analysis of gorilla behavior. She was unmoved, believing that she had to proceed as an altogether different kind of scientist, one who wore the hat of behaviorist and genealogist in addition to the traditional primatologist who brought specimens back to the lab. She trusted the knowledge she gained by observing the animals in their natural habitat and believed that her persistence bestowed continuity on her observations; in eighteen years she followed four extended families of animals over three generations, charting births, deaths, relocations, bouts of disease, and feuds among clans. She was essentially a Margaret Mead of the apes.36

Schaller, too, observed primate behavior in the wild, but his impulse as a Western scientist was to limit contact before immersion tainted his objectivity. As a policy, he took notes at least 150 feet away from the animals. When Fossey, however, let the animals crawl all over her, peers feared it was for her own emotional needs rather than the good of objective science. Sandy Harcourt, a primatologist at Karisoke until 1974, thought that Fossey's relations with the gorillas were inappropriate, sometimes pathetic. As poachers, scientists, and sponsors threatened to remove Fossey from her mountain, she took solace in what she interpreted as the apes' unconditional acceptance. She was known to wander alone to lookout points with no equipment. Harcourt believed that even if Fossey did witness "natural" behavior, she couldn't record anything beyond anecdote since she didn't have her charts.37

Leakey would have ignored the criticism were Fossey's funding not in jeopardy. Although he never intended to alter their field techniques, he made arrangements that allowed Goodall and Fossey to gain appropriate scientific certification, a kind of "union card," enrolling them in graduate programs at Cambridge University, under the renowned Sir Robert Hinde. Hinde's New Ethology was based on statistical measurements, maps, and charts, not the free-flowing description of behavior that Goodall and Fossey spoke into tape players and transcribed into their logs. It's in the numbers, he told them, not the narration; his science was, in a nutshell, without context of any kind. Fossey reluctantly kept tabs of animals' age, sex, and corresponding dung size and used the computers on campus to work up her data. Invariably, however, she settled into her own methods when she got back into the field. Goodall fell into bouts of depression as each semester began and she had to leave Tanzania for England. She was the first woman admitted to a Cambridge doctoral program without a bachelor's degree, but by the time she earned her PhD she was not convinced that formal training had informed her work for the better. Galdikas had come to the same conclusion: "In the classes I had taken at UCLA in the mid- to late sixties, budding anthropologists and primatologists learned to put their emotions aside, observe, and not interfere." This advice fell on deaf ears once she got to Borneo, for it didn't account for how she would be moved and her instincts heightened by what she observed.38

In the end, Leakey's Trimates turned into "professionals": he saw to it that all earned doctorates and eventually academic positions. Goodall and Galdikas spent several semesters in the 1970s as visiting professors at Stanford and Simon Fraser universities, and in 1980 Fossey left Karisoke to teach at Cornell. Still, they had their academic detractors who believed that their field methods tainted the purity of their observations. Zoologists, ethologists, primatologists, and animal behaviorists accused them of a crime more heinous to professional sensibilities than poaching for sport: anthropomorphizing their apes. They thought it inappropriate that Goodall gave chimps names rather than numbers for identification, for this practice seemed to value intimacy over emotional distance. The controversy was ironic, for famed baboon expert Irven DeVore had named his animals in 1958. Moreover, Goodall demonstrated that the practice served pragmatic needs. She differentiated between families of animals through the first letters of names. Flo's offspring, for example, were Flint, Figan, and Fifi; visitors to Gombe knew, if nothing else, that Pom and Passion were related. Graduate students also traced genealogical histories through the names of orangutans near Camp Leakey. Galdikas named the first wild animal she recognized Alice, followed by her son Andy, and then Beth, Cara, Carl, Cindy . . . Martha, Merv, and so on. Fossey designated gorilla groups with numbers, but within them animals had names like Peanuts and Icarus.39

The practice of naming betrayed a wholly different orientation to subject than that of gentleman behaviorists who had studied primate "types"--the chimp male, the gorilla female, the orangutan infant--earlier in the century. The Trimates sought to understand animals as individuals with unique traits within a larger system, much as McClintock studied her strains of corn. The psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow has theorized that women's viewing of the world from the perspective of connection, men's from detachment, may be the inherent consequence of early identity formation: girls ultimately identify with their mothers, their primary love-objects, while men grow detached from them. Carol Gilligan also uses psychological theory to explain women's tendency to individuate. Women are holistic and integrative thinkers, according to Gilligan, but they also particularize as they carry out their ethic of care; men generalize and sort into categories, imposing laws on nature so that it can be easily controlled. But names not only particularize; they open doors to infused meanings. Was it an objective practice to label animals according to physical traits, as in the case of Goodall's Throat Pouch or David Greybeard? What of labels bearing symbolic significance? When Passion bore a baby in 1977, it put an end to her killing of other females' offspring, and thus Goodall named her newborn Pax. Fossey named a gorilla in memory of her uncle Bert; one can only begin to speculate about the emotional baggage attached to that decision.40

Goodall recalled that when she began her study in 1960, "it was not permissible--at least not in ethological circles--to talk about an animal's mind. Only humans had minds." She was referring to an animal's emotions as well as intellect, and yet years of observation led her to conclude that chimps were nearly human emotionally, if less so intellectually. "I have often felt like an anthropologist taking notes on a tribe of people," she explained. They had thoughts, imaginations, feelings--all of which were understandable so long as one learned how to bridge the gulf in communication. It was vindicating when university labs confirmed that, genetically, chimps and humans were nearly 99 percent alike. The data made sense, given the parallels Goodall had noted in the field: "the long period of childhood dependency, the importance of learning, non-verbal communication patterns, tool-using and tool-making, cooperation in hunting, sophisticated social manipulations, aggressive territoriality, and a variety of helping behaviours, to name a few." Galdikas also viewed orangutans as "our relatives . . . our kin." Their only difference, she thought, was that they had never left the "Garden of Eden" and thus had never lost their innocence.41

The Trimates were so moved by the tightness of the mother-child bond in primates that they modeled primate mothers in rehabilitating orphaned apes and raising their infant boys. Much the same way in which Flint clung to Flo, Grub clung to Goodall and grew accustomed to constant cradling and caressing. Photos in National Geographic revealed a virtual interchangeability between infant human and primate at Gombe, Karisoke, and Camp Leakey: Binti Brindamour, Galdikas's son, took baths with primate orphans; Goodall and Grub posed in ways identical to Flo and Fifi; Fossey graced a magazine cover cradling baby apes much as Galdikas did five years later. Her instinct to mother was not Brindamour's instinct to father in the nuclear sense, but she explained that it wasn't the orangutan male's either. When it became clear that the orphaned orangutan Sugito had chosen her to become his adoptive mother, Brindamour's knee-jerk reaction was to insist on differentiation, while Sugito's was to bite and urinate on his male competition. Galdikas's response was to become the perfect primate mother, patient and protective. Despite her husband's objections, she conceded her supper to the orphan and let him accompany her in the tub. "Under Rod's suspicious gaze, Sugito became my infant. . . . There were moments when I glanced down at Sugito holding on to me, and for a split second I forgot that he wasn't human and wasn't my biological child."42

In this moment Galdikas felt much as McClintock had when McClintock "got down in there" to study her corn: she achieved a feeling for her organism and had been forever changed by it. Critics believed that her emotional attachment made her blind to the ways in which apes actually differed from human beings. Sometimes she agreed: "I could rattle off a list of the differences. But I had lost that gut feeling of separation, which is an integral part of Western intellectual consciousness." Asymmetries did strike her once she observed her own son playing with infant orangs. Binti had come to climb trees and gesticulate like baby Tarzan, and for a time it seemed that distinctions between primate and human infants had "virtually disappeared." But then Binti's physical and emotional development diverged from his primate friends'. She eventually banned his playmates from camp, fearing that their nearly human feelings of sibling rivalry would result in a nonhuman display of physical strength against him.43

Goodall thought that there was a fine line between observer and observed but that her close proximity to the chimps gave her more in sight in the end. "We are not, as once we believed, separated from the rest of the animal kingdom by an unbridgeable chasm," she wrote in 1990. "Nevertheless, we must not forget, not for an instant, that even if we do not differ from the apes in kind, but only in degree, that degree is still overwhelmingly large." It was large enough for her, too, to limit the chimps' interactions with Grub, who never entered the forest without a parent. Although he had lived at Gombe since four months of age, it was increasingly clear that if given the opportunity, the chimps would likely devour him. In her efforts to study apes outside captivity, Goodall caged her son as he slept. To her horror, the chimps Pom and Passion had posed a threat to their own, killing others' chimp babies and eating them. Her descriptions of the unexplainable violence took experts aback at a UNESCO conference in Paris; many wanted to believe that violence was peculiar to the human species, that it was a result of culture, not nature. Goodall left the door open to wonder if the nature of apes was in fact the nature of humans.44

References for this section:

22. Hayes, Dark Romance, 124-25; Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 72.

23. Mary Leakey, Disclosing the Past (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984); Montgomery,
Walking with the Great Apes, 70-75.

24. Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, 6; Jocelyn Selim, "Why Chimps Still Deserve Our
Respect," Discover 25 (May 2004), 18-19.

25. Leakey, Disclosing the Past, 46, 80-81, 122, 156; Goodall, Africa in My Blood, 109;
Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 65; Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 86-87;
Mowat, Woman in the Mist, 80-81.

26. David Botstein, "Discovery of the Bacterial Transposition Tn10," in The Dynamic
Genome: Barbara McClintock's Ideas in the Century of Genetics, ed. Nina Federoff and
David Botstein (Plainview, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1992), 225.

27. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 49; Spaulding, A Dark Place in the Jungle, 65;
Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 78.

28. Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist, 2; Hayes, Dark Romance, 189; Galdikas, Reflections of
Eden, 32, 277; Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 80-81.

29. Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist, 4; Mowat, Woman in the Mist, 23; Gallardo, Among the
Orangutans, 10; Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 80.

30. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 309, 330.

31. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 300.

32. James Krasner, "'Ape Ladies' and Cultural Politics: Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas," in Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science, ed. Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 239.

33. Deborah Blum, The Monkey Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 95;
H. F. Harlow, R. O. Dodsworth, and M. K. Harlow, "Total Social Isolation in Monkeys,"
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 54 (July 1965): 90-97; Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6; Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 93, 111-12.

34. Goodall, Africa in My Blood, 156, 190; Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes,
111, 127.

35. Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist, 11.

36. See statistical appendices in Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist, 245-86.

37. Hayes, Dark Romance, 138-39, 198, 292-94.

38. Mowat, Woman in the Mist, 85-86, 88; Goodall, Africa in My Blood, 190-91;
Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 101-2, 105-6, 143, 147-48; Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 246-47.

39. Hayes, Dark Romance, 140.

40. Nancy Chodorow, "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," in Women, Culture,
and Society, ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 43-66; The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 104.

41. Goodall, Through a Window, 14, 206; Africa in My Blood, 231-32; Galdikas,
Reflections of Eden, 19.

42. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 131, 139-40, 316; Montgomery, Walking with the Great Apes, 35.

43. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden, 311-15.

44. Goodall, Through a Window, 207; In the Shadow of Man, 258-59; Beyond Innocence, 192.

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University of Arizona's Michael Hammer's findings suggest that as anatomically modern humans arrived in Asia, they interbred with archaic hominids called Homo erectus. (Will Seberger)

Maybe it’s the scooter propped in the corner of his office, or the fact that he’s wearing a T-shirt and denim cargo shorts while sporting a gold hoop in his left ear, but Michael Hammer definitely looks more like a surfer than one of the world’s leading gene detectives. The maps are a giveaway, though. His tiny cell of an office, which looks out onto a grove of lazily waving palm trees, is decorated with several maps of the planet. He has more maps — colorful wall-sized affairs — in his various labs scattered around the University of Arizona campus. Standing back from one of these maps, Hammer can look deep into human history. He sees the movement of ancient Asians into the New World and the rapid expansion of seagoing peoples across the Pacific 3,000 years ago. He can even discern the migrations of our early ancestors out of Africa 60 millennia or so back in time.

For Hammer, a population geneticist, it is a story told in our DNA, the nucleic acid that transmits the information encoded in genes down through generations. Curled up tightly into chromosomes, DNA is a long, twisting ladder-like chain of thousands of simple molecules called nucleotides, lined up in pairs. These base pairs occasionally drop out or repeat in distinctive ways as the DNA is passed from parent to child.

Scientists can figure out when these base pair variations — single nucleotide polymorphisms — diverged from one another, allowing them to build elaborate family trees stretching back tens of thousands of years. In a 2008 paper, for example, Hammer found chromosomal evidence that throughout human history, men have generally produced more offspring than women. (He calls it the Clint Eastwood effect after the legendary actor/director, who fathered seven children with five women.)

In plumbing this and other mysteries, Hammer and his collaborators rely on thousands of samples of DNA — mostly in the form of cheek swabs — they have collected from people all over the world. “It’s genealogy at the level of families, genealogy at the level of distant cousins, genealogy at the level of populations that migrated in the last 3,000 years, all the way back to the genealogy of modern and archaic humans,” Hammer explains.

In a series of recent studies, Hammer and his collaborators have found a unique sequence on the X chromosome suggesting that as anatomically modern humans arrived in Asia, they interbred with archaic hominids called Homo erectus. It’s a controversial claim, given the prevailing view that modern humans emerging from Africa replaced Homo erectus without cross-mating. To Hammer, the interbreeding makes perfect biological sense, especially if one questions the assumption that Homo erectus and Homo sapiens were genetically isolated species.

More likely, he says, they existed on a genetic continuum. He notes that members of baboon species that diverged as long as 4 million years ago can still mate and produce viable offspring.

“If there’s occasional interbreeding, and one form, the modern human, is outnumbering the archaic form, we might expect little pieces of our genome to trace back to the archaic form,” Hammer says. “Those pieces of the genome would be fairly divergent from the rest of the genome.”

If Hammer’s parsing of the genetic code often aims to untangle humanity’s deepest history, it also has practical application. He’s used his skills to probe the ancestry of modern-day Japanese and to try to identify Mexican immigrants who died while attempting to cross southern Arizona’s blistering Sonoran Desert on foot. And he has set up a nonprofit foundation to build a genetic database of Holocaust survivors that may help descendants know their family histories. Even when his studies focus on the real world of the 21st century, though, they never roam far from that largest of philosophical questions: Where did we come from?

Sitting in his office on a warm Tucson day, Hammer treats me to a dazzling two-hour cram course in modern genetics. The field has come a long way in a generation. When Hammer started 30 years ago — he’s now 55 — scientists painstakingly crossbred animal or plant specimens to isolate specific genes, and they needed massive amounts of tissue to extract small amounts of genetic material. Today, automated gene sequencers can unravel the nucleotide sequence of a bacterium in a few hours. These technical advances make it possible to study an entire genome, as opposed to a handful of selected targets, but they also create a mind-boggling amount of data.

“We’re in the business now of figuring out how we grind all that data,” Hammer says. “We’re using supercomputers, trying to figure out statistical methods that will allow us to take this huge amount of data and analyze it.”

Hammer has a particular knack for looking above the details supplied by technology to ask deep questions about human origins — to be able to see the genetic forest for the trees. Through the years he has collaborated with paleontologists, linguists and anthropologists, eager to answer the big questions about human origins in a multifaceted way.

Hammer’s journey began in Highland Park, Ill., where he was one of three children raised by a stay-at-home mother and a father who was in the steel business. He was interested in marine biology but graduated from Lake Forest College with a liberal arts degree. After a stint as a technician in a molecular biology lab at the University of Chicago, he was accepted into a graduate program in evolution run by the late Allan C. Wilson at the University of California, Berkeley.

Wilson, who pioneered the use of molecular biology to understand evolutionary mechanisms, made a big impact. “I thought, ‘This is the guy I want to work with,’” Hammer recalls. “He was working on things like the evolution of gene expression. He was basically trying to explain what were the key genetic changes that tracked the major things we see in life.”

Hammer, who earned his doctorate in 1984, started out researching how house mice evolved the ability to use lysozyme, an enzyme that the body normally uses to attack bacteria, to help them digest plants. But in his eyes, the biggest mystery back then — as now — revolved around how, when and where modern humans arose.

In the 1980s, paleontologists who studied skeletal remains were divided into two camps. Pretty much everyone agreed that a wave of early Homo erectus had spread out of Africa across the Eurasian landmass — Peking Man and Java Man being some of the better-known examples. The “multiregional” school of thought held that Homo erectus and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) evolved into modern humans continuously in many places across Eurasia. The other view — dubbed the “Out of Africa” model — contended that anatomically modern humans evolved from H. erectus somewhere in Africa and migrated out in a second wave, entirely supplanting the earlier human population.

Meanwhile, in Wilson’s Berkeley lab, researchers Rebecca Cann and Mark Stoneking were studying human mitochondrial DNA. The DNA in our mitochondria — tiny energy powerhouses in our cells — mutates at a higher rate than the rest of our genome, providing a magnified view of evolutionary change. In 1987, the Berkeley researchers published a paper in Nature that decisively weighed in on the side of the “Out of Africa” hypothesis. Genetics was starting to answer questions hitherto reserved for other disciplines.

But mitochondrial DNA, which is usually passed only through the mother and is distinct from our nuclear DNA, tells only part of the story. Hammer, who was in Wilson’s lab when Cann and Stoneking were carrying out their research, developed an interest in the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son.

In post-doctoral work at Princeton and in the Harvard lab of Richard Lewontin, another giant in genetics and evolutionary biology, Hammer mastered newly developed methods of teasing apart DNA into smaller, more manageable elements.

One was the polymerase chain reaction, a method of quickly copying DNA segments that has become a standard tool in genetic analysis. Another was the use of “four-cutter” restriction enzymes (so named because they recognize places in a DNA chain that are four specific nucleotides long) to isolate and identify short fragments of DNA. These small sections of the chromosome sometimes rearrange the ordering of their base pairs, either through selective evolutionary pressures or a process of random shuffling known as genetic drift.

Geneticists have learned to track these base pair reorderings, known as polymorphisms, to see how the genome has changed through time.

Now Hammer brought these techniques to bear on the Y chromosome, which was slow in giving up its secrets. In fact, the earliest investigators thought that unlike all other chromosomes, the Y had no polymorphic diversity — which would have made it a peculiar exception. But Hammer proved them wrong. “It turns out that’s not the case,” Hammer says. “There were just very low levels of diversity on the Y, and we just needed to look at lots and lots of DNA in sequence to find it. I started finding some variation with these four-cutter filter methods. In the meantime, PCR had become a real technique, and so I started switching over to PCR and direct DNA sequencing, and found some of the first polymorphisms on the Y.”

Just as had happened with mitochondrial DNA, Hammer started to build a family tree of Y polymorphisms (today more than 700 are known), leading back to a common male African ancestor something like 110,000 years ago.

By 1991, Hammer had moved to the University of Arizona, where he was charged with developing the university’s core genomics laboratory. In 1994, Russian research geneticist Tatiana Karafet joined Hammer’s lab. Karafet had spent a lot of time collecting demographic information and DNA samples from Siberian tribes. “It was obvious we had great resources for studying the source populations for Native Americans,” Hammer says. They set about collecting Native-American DNA to match against the Siberian samples. That proved difficult because many Native Americans object to being research subjects, Hammer says.

In 1986, a trio of prominent researchers had proposed that there were three waves of migration from Asia into the New World via the Bering Land Bridge. They drew on dental and genetic data, as well as the fact that all the languages in North and South America seem to fall into three “superfamilies.”

In 1997, though, Hammer and Karafet looked at the Y chromosomes in their more than 1,600 samples. Their data pointed to a single migration of ancestral Native Americans, probably originating in the Altai Mountains of central Asia. “Today we could do a lot more with the genomic data,” he says. (A study of whole-genome DNA recently published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution reached the same conclusion as Hammer’s team.)

All in all, the era of Y-chromosome research was a heady time. “We suddenly were turned loose,” Hammer says. “We had a cottage industry. We could type these Y markers, and we could look at populations all over the world. I got very interested in the peopling of Japan. I got interested in Jewish groups and the Jewish Diaspora and the peopling of Europe. It’s like there are a million stories in the naked city.”

In the early 1990s, Hammer had discovered a 300 base-pair element on the Y chromosome that had a very unusual pattern of expression. It shows up in 50 percent of sub-Saharan Africans and at very low frequencies in Europe and most of Asia. But some 35 percent of Japanese carry it, as do isolated groups in Tibet and the Andaman Islands. How had such widely separated groups come to have the same genetic marker?

Collaborating with some Japanese researchers, Hammer sampled DNA from throughout the Japanese islands and discovered a trend: People in Okinawa and Hokkaido, the southernmost and northernmost areas respectively, had the highest concentration of the rare variation, but it was lowest in central Japan, at the point closest to Korea.

Hammer thought this supported a hypothesis that the Japanese are actually a hybrid of two ancient migrations. The first people, about 10,000 years ago, were known as the Jomon, a hunter-gatherer group that also made a distinctive style of pottery. “They were able to probably just walk over to Japan from the continent of Asia because sea levels were lower,” Hammer says. “Then, as the glacial maximum passed and sea levels rose again, the archipelago was isolated from Asia for 8,000 years.”

But about 2,000 years ago, a new wave of rice-cultivating immigrants arrived from Korea by boat — the Yayoi. “Probably the Yayoi descend from one of these groups that extended out from southern China with rice agriculture,” Hammer says. “They brought their genes with them, and they were different genes, different Y chromosomes.”

Hammer believes the rare Y-chromosome marker came to Japan with the Jomon. “The Jomon origin probably goes back to somewhere in central Asia, and that’s why we find that marker on the Y in Tibet,” he says.

“In most of our history, up through the past couple of hundred years, people really did sit where they were,” Hammer says. “They really didn’t move very far. So you get this nice gradient of variation that reflects these old, old migratory processes. I think it’s one of the nicer examples of that.”

Jews, whose Diaspora started with the Babylonian exile and continued through the Roman occupation, are something of an exception, having dispersed widely in western Eurasia and northern Africa. That prompted Hammer to wonder whether modern Jews retain close genetic links to their ancestors. “Are contemporary Jews descendants of Middle Eastern or biblical Jews?” Hammer asks. “Are they really converts? Was there so much intermarriage that the Middle Eastern genetic signal was diluted out?”

In a 2000 paper, Hammer and his colleagues reported that a comparison of Y-chromosome markers showed most Jewish groups were closely related to one another, despite having been scattered across central Europe, North Africa, Spain and Yemen. They showed only slight genetic admixture with their neighboring non-Jewish populations, but they turned out to be closely related to contemporary Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians.

Earlier, in 1997, Hammer co-authored the first paper showing that there was a genetic marker on the Y chromosome that seemed to correlate with a shared common paternal ancestor for the Kohanim — the Jewish priestly caste — a finding that gained widespread news coverage.

For all the information he has managed to wring from the Y (or male) chromosome, Hammer in recent years has joined his peers in using markers from the X chromosome and the 22 pairs of non-sex chromosomes in a cell’s nucleus, which are known as autosomes.

These days, he’s collaborating with Steve Lansing, a University of Arizona social anthropologist, on the Austronesian Societies Project, which uses genetics, linguistics, anthropology and mathematical modeling to trace the expansion of Austronesian-speaking people through the Indonesian archipelago.

“We’re using genetics more like the fossil record,” Hammer says. “You’re studying recent linguistic change happening on a very recent time scale, and there’s no fossil record for language. We’ve kind of turned it on its head and used genes to reconstruct the movements of people, then superimposing their languages on top of the population history.”

Lansing, who has known Hammer since 1999, says that just as Hammer can use his tools to reconstruct large-scale migrations that took place thousands of years ago, the Indonesian research is working on the scale of individual villages within the past few hundred years.

Meanwhile, Lansing says, he and Hammer are joining with mathematicians at the Santa Fe Institute, where Lansing also has an appointment, to study the microevolution of the malaria parasite. They plan to replicate the bug from blood samples drawn from villagers, then study how its genome has evolved over time. That in turn could give medical researchers insights into new strategies for fighting the disease.

The big, established centers for population genetics may be at major research universities like Harvard and Stanford, Lansing says, but Hammer has made a name for himself nonetheless. “Michael set up this little shop in Arizona, and it seems to keep turning out all these interesting results,” Lansing says. “He’s a one-man band.”

In recent years, Hammer has revisited the question of modern human origins addressed two decades ago by his Berkeley colleagues. He saw shortcomings with both the prevailing “Out of Africa” model and the multiregional theory that Homo erectus evolved into modern humans all over Eurasia. “I think both models are overly simplistic,” he says. “The truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think we’re more towards the African origin and replacement — clearly there was a huge advantage for much of our genome to fit that model, but not all of it. It’s the exceptions that are going to be the most interesting in revealing what humans were like biologically and behaviorally, a hundred thousand years ago.”

Previous research that had focused on mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome had found no evidence that Homo erectus or Neanderthals had contributed to the modern human genome, Hammer says. But in the past five years, Hammer and his collaborators have found that a 2-million-year-old variation of RRM2P4 “pseudogene” on the X chromosome is much more common in east Asia than anywhere else. (Pseudogenes are defunct relatives of known genes that no longer seem to have a cellular function but provide clues about when and how the genome changed. Like other genes, their names derive from their function and their location on the chromosome.) They interpret this as evidence of interbreeding in Asia that would, to some extent, undermine the “Out of Africa” theory.

One problem with the “Out of Africa” theory (also known as the Single Origin theory) is that it tends to assume anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa at a particular moment, within a small, isolated population — a proverbial Garden of Eden. “That would be very unbiological, in a lot of ways of thinking about it,” Hammer says. “Most species do not have pure, isolated origins. Why would humans be different?”

Hammer acknowledges that the single example of RRM2P4 doesn’t prove his case. “You really need to find evidence from more than one part of the genome,” he says. “What we’re finding is there are other regions of the genome that show that pattern, but they don’t necessarily show Asian populations versus African populations. We’re seeing this pattern within Africa.”

In other words, it’s possible that as anatomically modern humans were mingling with archaic hominids across Eurasia, the same thing was happening within Africa involving as-yet-unidentified groups, perhaps the African version of Homo erectus or the Neanderthal. “We may use genetics here as a predictor of what the paleontologists might find,” Hammer says.

The University of Arizona lists Hammer as a research scientist, relieving him of teaching duties, although he does lecture and work with graduate students in a number of different departments. He presides over a multifaceted operation, serving as director of the university’s Genomic Analysis and Technology Core facility, which provides centralized training and DNA services, and the Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory, which performs high-volume DNA testing for both academic and private-sector clients.

After hours, Hammer shares child-care duties for his 13-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son with his former wife. His daughter was born with severe autism and epilepsy that has left her with minimal communication skills. Over veggie spring rolls at an off-campus Vietnamese eatery, he tells me that he, his children and their mother have contributed their DNA to a study an associate is conducting. “If I were to go to school again, I’d go into neurogenetics because I think that is the next frontier in terms of understanding human disease, biology and behavior,” he says. “For personal reasons, I’d like to know what kinds of genetic changes can lead to the kinds of dysfunction that I see in my daughter.”

We walk across campus to Bio 5, the university’s state-of-the-art research complex, where Matt Kaplan supervises the Human Origins Genotyping Laboratory. Kaplan, one of Hammer’s former graduate assistants who took part in some of the Jewish population research, shows me how robotic equipment processes newly arrived cheek swabs through several steps into testable samples of DNA. The lab tests between 1,000 and 4,500 samples a week, Kaplan says. Each person’s DNA is extracted from a comb-like plastic swab that scrapes cells from the inside of the cheek.

Many of the swabs, sealed into small, fluid-filled tubes, come from Family Tree DNA, a Houston-based commercial testing venture for which Hammer also serves as chief scientist. Family Tree and Kaplan’s lab are handling the public testing for The Genographic Project, a five-year research effort sponsored by IBM and National Geographic to create an inventory of DNA collected from around the world. Kaplan estimates the lab has tested more than 260,000 samples for the project since 2005.

Kaplan shows me a National Geographic map created depicting ancient migration routes around the world as deduced from Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. “You can actually swab your cheek and find out which one of those lines on the map is your paternal lineage,” he says matter-of-factly. “It isn’t magic. This is stuff we have been doing as academic researchers for years.”

Hammer co-founded the DNA Shoah Project, which is using Kaplan’s genotyping laboratory to create a database of genetic material from Holocaust survivors and their immediate descendants. The nonprofit organization hopes to make it possible for descendants to find displaced relatives and learn about their biological families.

The project is a partnership with Syd Mandelbaum, a businessman and the son of Holocaust survivors, who read a news story in 2005 about the discovery of World War II-era remains in Germany and realized there was no genetic database available to help identify and repatriate them. “The idea is not that we’re going to try to test the genetic material in the bones directly, but build a database — a ‘build it and they will come’ sort of thing,” Hammer says. “What we would like to do is store the survivors’ DNA. Unfortunately there’s only a thousand (samples collected) now, and there’s a couple hundred thousand to get. Getting the word out and getting funded to do this has been slowing us down.” He estimates that the project will need about $500,000 to get fully up to speed.

Hammer notes that in the next 15 years the last of the Holocaust survivors will be gone. “I almost feel like we have to do it because we can,” he says. Although “Shoah” is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, the project would be open to all victims of the Nazi genocide — Poles, Gypsies and Russians as well as Jews, Hammer says. “Anybody who’s a survivor of the Holocaust can get their DNA taken for free and stored, and we take all the information about their family history.”

Hammer has also consulted with the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office, which is storing the bodies of more than 200 people who died in the desert while trying to cross illegally from Mexico into the U.S. “We’d like to be able to help families in Mexico get their bodies back,” he says. “In the meantime, while they’re not identified, they sit in the morgue for years, and then they’re cremated. It costs the county money. It costs the families grief. … If we could just make a database of the families and then type the bones, we could actually match them up.”

In the meantime, Hammer hopes to add nuance to the “Out of Africa” model of human origins, looking at how genes might have flowed as diverging populations occasionally came back into contact and hybridized. “In plants, there’s a huge amount of novelty that comes from hybridizing,” he points out. “I don’t see why that couldn’t be something that was part of our history. Populations that were ecologically suited for one region in Africa or another could have shared their genes to give rise to a progenitor that had the advantages of both ancestors. The novelty is coming from not being in a special place and uniquely experiencing one environment, but from the multiple experiences of the groups.”

Hunting for clues to support his hunch, Hammer will examine more odd and overlooked bits of DNA that may speak to unexpected patterns of human mating and migration. “Clearly the bulk of the genome is telling us something that is fairly well accepted. What we don’t know will be discovered by looking at these other, exceptional regions.

“I believe that they’re there at some rate,” he says. “We’ll be able to learn more about our ancestry.

“It may be more complicated than what the current model will accommodate.”

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