Missing Links and Dawn Monkeys

Missing Links and Dawn Monkeys

In rural China, the highest compliment you can get is not that you’re
attractive or smart. It’s that you work really hard. As I shift to stay in
the scant midday shade offered by a deep ravine on the northern bank
of the Yellow River, this proletarian attitude makes a lot of sense. When
I left the United States earlier this month, spring had barely begun. Checking
the calendar in my field notebook, I see that it’s only mid May—too
early in the season for a heat wave. Yet for the past few days, my team
has endured triple digit temperatures. Each of us sports a tan several
shades deeper than our normal hue. A few yards away, where he chips
at a piece of freshwater limestone that just might contain a fossil, my
colleague Wang Jingwen is beginning to live up to his nickname, which
translates roughly as “black donkey.” I’m told that the local villagers have
been praising our work ethic, because when it gets this hot, even the peasants
take a siesta under a shade tree.
We have no choice but to tolerate the heat of the noon sun, because
it provides the best lighting conditions for finding fossils. At this time of
day, there are no shadows to hide the small jaws and limb bones that
have been entombed in these rock strata for the past forty thousand millennia
or so. Having traversed twelve time zones to get here, I’m not about
to forgo the chance to find an important specimen merely because of the

oppressive heat.