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First steps Just as all parents proudly note the day their baby first walks upright, now we can all mark the date when our ancestors first accomplished this same feat—somewhere between 5.2 and 5.8 million years ago. In a July issue of Nature, Cal graduate student Yohannes Haile-Selassie of Ethiopia describes finding the bones and teeth of what could be our oldest hominid ancestor. Before now, the oldest known hominid was 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithicus ramidus. Its fossilized bones were unearthed by world-renowned Berkeley paleontologist Tim White in 1994 in the Middle Awash River Valley, part of the Afar depression of Ethiopia, and just 25 kilometers away from this latest find. Over the years, this region has provided paleontologists with rich pickings, yielding such famous fossils as Lucy, the First Family, and the Aramis Skeleton, as well as countless stone tools. The deeply carved river valley has provided the longest and most complete record of human and pre-human habitation in the world. For now, Haile-Selassie is classifying the 11 fossil specimens he found as a subspecies of A. ramidus that he calls Ardipithicus ramidus kadabba (the word kadabba is Afar for “basal family ancestor”), although it may turn out to be an entirely new species. He determined that the fossils belonged to a human ancestor, not to an ancestor of any other living ape, because the teeth show certain characteristics seen only in humans and hominids. The collection also includes a toe bone that indicates the creature walked upright—the toe shares the anatomy of all later hominids, which walked in a “heel-to-toe” fashion, rather than on the outside of their feet, as other apes do. Haile-Selassie writes that the toe bone “is consistent with an early form of terrestrial bipedality.”  Teeth and bones of Ardipithicus ramidus kadabba The fossils have generated a great deal of interest because they date to around the time when molecular biological studies indicate that humans and chimpanzees parted evolutionary company, around 5.5 to 6.5 million years ago. Their age, coupled with some primitive characteristics, suggests that these bones may belong to one of the very first species of the human lineage. Haile-Selassie claims that good fortune led him to stumble upon the first of the fossils in 1997: “[The jawbone] was sitting on the surface, waiting for some lucky guy to pick it up, and it turned out to be me!” But White, his thesis adviser, says that it was not merely luck, that Haile-Selassie is one of the most outstanding field anthropologists he has ever known. White believes that these are “only the first steps of what will undoubtedly be a distinguished career.” White calls it a “huge development” that African researchers like Haile-Selassie are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve and joining the international scientific community at the highest level. “Unfortunately, too often, in too many countries, only lip service has been paid to the involvement of African scholars in paleoanthropological research,” says White. “You will find that, in nearly all cases, Africans have performed the fieldwork, and outside foreign academics have visited just long enough to extract the fossils, before returning to their home country to publish [the findings], sometimes hardly acknowledging the local people who did field labor in the host country. In short, there has too often been an exploitative relationship between western scientists and local scholars.” He credits the efforts of former Berkeley paleontologists J. Desmond Clark and Clark Howell for bringing about this change. They established the Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies at Berkeley to nurture and train scientists from developing countries—Ethiopia in particular—to become paleoanthropologists. “This is an example of how that has paid off scientifically, for Africa and for Ethiopia,” says White. —Ayala Ochert Transferring to UC On July 19, the UC Regents approved a new policy that grants provisional UC admission to high school seniors who are between the top 4 percent and the top 12.5 percent of their class in each California high school. These students will be simultaneously admitted to both a UC campus and a community college. Once they successfully complete UC freshman and sophomore requirements at a community college, they may then finish their undergraduate studies at UC. The program aims to streamline the overall transfer process, and will put a UC counselor on site at each community college. The policy is expected to go into effect for students applying for entrance in fall 2003; the first class transferring to UC through the program would do so in fall 2005. The University currently guarantees admission to the top 4 percent of students at any given California high school and to the top 12.5 percent of all graduates statewide. It is expected that the new program will improve transfer rates from community colleges, particularly for currently under-represented groups, including minority students, those from rural areas, and students who are economically disadvantaged. Supporters claim the program will build a connection with the University and provide motivation for students who may have otherwise thought that a UC education was beyond their reach. But some critics are concerned that, with an estimated cost of $2.5 million per year, funding may not be available to support the program. The program is the latest in a series of proposals by UC President Richard Atkinson, who made headlines in the spring with his suggestion that UC eliminate the SAT I as a standard for admission. Atkinson also has encouraged each campus to consider students’ socioeconomic background and opportunities when evaluating applications. The enactment of the new policy follows on the heels of the regents’ unanimous decision in May to rescind SP-1, the proclamation that banned racial criteria in UC admissions six years ago. Huckleberry Finn’s latest adventure Using the long-lost first half of Twain’s original manuscript of Huckleberry Finn, scholars at the Bancroft Library’s Mark Twain Project have completed a new authoritative edition of this classic of American literature.
Published in July, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The Only Authoritative Text represents hundreds of hours of painstaking research by Berkeley’s Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Using the full original manuscript, Twain’s notebooks, letters, interviews, and a host of contemporary cultural materials, they have created annotations that set the novel in its historical context. This latest edition also includes all 174 original illustrations by cartoonist Edward Windsor Kemble. Twain’s letters indicate that he sent both halves of his original manuscript to a James Frasier Gluck in Buffalo to house in the local library. But the Buffalo and Area County Library owned only the second half of the manuscript, and for years Twain scholars wondered about the location of the first half. Then, in 1991, Gluck’s granddaughter found the long-lost manuscript in the attic of her Hollywood home, putting an end to the mystery. Fischer recalls the day he first saw the manuscript: “I was very excited—there were so many unanswered questions. I felt an extraordinary sense of privilege to get to see it and work on this book.” The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has enjoyed enduring popularity since it was first published in 1885, and not just because it is a good story, say the editors. “One hundred and fifteen years after its publication, critics and scholars are still scouring the book for what is real—for clues to the counterparts of its fiction—attempting to somehow grasp the essence of what it says about American history and culture,” they write in the foreword to the new edition. For example, the editors have deduced that Twain’s description of a “regular, old-fashioned, keel-boat breakdown” refers to what we would today call “break dancing.” They find evidence that this kind of dancing was popular in pre-Civil War days and that it was an adaptation of an African dance. “Sometimes a thing goes underground for a while, then it comes back and people think it’s new,” says Fischer. “But some of this cultural stuff has deep roots.” With Twain’s notebooks, the full original manuscript, and the first edition alongside one another, the editors were able to solve one mystery once and for all: when the book was written. It was started in 1874, and finished in 1884; Twain took two breaks of three years each in which he wrote nothing. This was apparently his normal mode of writing—he said that the “tank would run dry,” and then after some “mysterious cerebration” during the interval, it would become “filled” again.
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 Graduate student Yohannes Haile-Selassie
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