I rented an apartment in Savannah and started taking some courses in videography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I offered to work at a local television station, WSAV, for free, and soon they had me hauling the enormous cameras around, training in teleprompter duties, and within two months, working beside the director, training to run live news. I started envying the life of the field reporters: men and women in their 20s at the forefront of the action. I hatched another plan, and soon I was working full-time as a news photographer.
One thing led to another. I still today consider my time as a cameraman some of the most fun I have ever had. We would sit in the newsroom and monitor the police radio frequencies. Sometimes we raced to a scene, either alone or with a reporter; sometimes we would cover a planned event. For a 20-year-old, it felt like riding a roller coaster. A call would come in at ten o’clock at night, just an hour before the news at 11. The producer would shout, “Get me footage for the headlines!” and I was on my way. I knew the score: This could be the lead story, and whichever station had video would win the night.
Thus began my journey as a night crime news photographer. Paired with a young producer, Beth Hammock, we became a two-person newsroom with the freedom to chase any story. Our shift began at 11:30 in the evening and ended after the morning news at 6:30 a.m. Usually, I would patrol the early parts of the morning in high-crime-rate areas, trying to bump into a story. Catching up with police officers, many of whom became good friends, and monitoring the police frequencies became my nightly routine. It was exciting, fulfilling, and Beth and I felt like we were pioneers.
I was having a great time, but eventually I had to come to terms with the fact that I was out of my element. My colleagues were all trained professionals. It was time for me to finish college, but I knew this really wasn’t the career path for me. So I enrolled at East Georgia State College, a two-year school. I met some remarkable professors there, passionate about geology and history. I learned that ancient marine deposits in southern Georgia might contain dinosaur fossils. One long weekend, I loaded up the back of my canopied Ford Ranger with an inflatable mattress, sleeping bag, and supplies borrowed from my geology professor, and went fossil hunting.
Georgia’s geology is defined by the fall line, which cuts through the state roughly southwest to northeast between Columbus and Augusta. The ancient coastline of the Atlantic Ocean, the fall line represents a geological divide between older and younger rock formations. The fall line region itself is underlain by more ancient rocks and has attractive rolling hills of mixed hardwoods and pines. Below the fall line stretches a relatively flat landscape, a coastal plain with sediments ranging in age from the late Cretaceous (65 to 80 million years ago) to only a few thousand years old.
I found a likely spot at a river bend and began sieving. Soon I had collected a wonderful array of well-preserved marine invertebrates: large fossil clams, sharks’ teeth, sharks’ feces (preserved shark poo), fish and ray remains—even the odd bit of dinosaur bone. This was real treasure hunting. I spent the next three days waking up at dawn and wading into that river, collecting hundreds of fossils from the age of the dinosaurs. My geology professor greeted the discoveries with great enthusiasm. I was hooked on fossil hunting!
One afternoon, doing research for a history report, I found a title in the card catalog: Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. I pulled the paperback off the shelf and read as Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey described the search for human origins in the Afar region of Ethiopia. I was entranced.
That evening, I left the library not only with Lucy but with every other book I could find on the subject of early human fossils. I had been leaning toward studying dinosaurs, thinking about Georgia’s fossil beds, but this work fascinated me, even though it could only be done in Africa.
I was astounded to read about how scarce the human fossil record really was. Our distant ancestors weren’t like dinosaurs, with thousands upon thousands of remains. The partial skeletons of hominins that had been found could be counted on one hand. Here was a field where I might make a difference, where new exploration and discovery might change science.
I needed to go to a bigger school, and I chose Georgia Southern University. Close to Sylvania, it was still a midsize school, with the small town of Statesboro nestled around it. Beyond lay the vast areas of rural Georgia where I had grown up.
My time at Georgia Southern was filled with fieldwork in paleontology and archaeology. I spent every spare hour in the lab, sorting micro-mammal remains from marine sediments, preparing whale bones with a drill, gluing together mosasaur ribs, washing and labeling artifacts, or identifying pottery sherds. My professors were passionate about their work, and they had a profound impact on my life. Gale Bishop, a world-renowned invertebrate paleontologist and perhaps the world’s leader in fossil crabs, introduced me to fossil discovery methods. Richard Petkewich, a fossil mammologist, trained me in lab methods and fieldwork in the muddy estuaries around Savannah. I helped him with the preparation of an archaeocete, an ancient legged whale, which had been found near the nuclear power station on the Savannah River. I spent hours with anthropology professors Sue Moore and Richard Persico, discussing the history of my new favorite subject, paleoanthropology.
But was I going to be a dinosaur paleontologist or a paleoanthropologist? And if the latter, how would I ever get to Africa, where the fossils were?
Again, serendipity played a role in my future. Donald Johanson, discoverer of Lucy and my hero of modern paleoanthropology, had been invited to give a lecture to the Georgia Science Teachers Association in Savannah. Here was my chance to meet a real field paleoanthropologist. We hit it off well enough that he invited me to come work as a geology assistant with his team at the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. It was my chance to do fieldwork in Africa! But that trip never materialized. I found out later it had to do with work permit issues in Tanzania. Still, thanks to Don Johanson’s help, I was accepted into a summer program at the Koobi Fora Field School in Kenya, where the celebrated paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey’s famous “hominid gang” was exploring new fossil sites on the east side of Lake Turkana.
That was 1989; I was 24 years old, and Africa turned out to be everything I had dreamed of and more. On my first excursion into the field, as I was just learning how to find fossils in those ancient lake environments, I spotted something lying on the lake’s barren surface and pulled up a fragment of thighbone—a piece of a hominin femur. I was hooked!