The others had been torn apart or brought to the ground. Twenty minutes off the 15 freeway, at the Minneola exit, the site lay in ruins. I reached out to the Bureau of Land Management again, and its field director, Katrina Symons, agreed to a tour. One of the problems out there is that nothing is ever carried to a conclusion.” “There needs to be more research,” he said, “and we need to carry the science to the final conclusion. Chris Christensen, 85, had stories to share: of Leakey’s celebrity and of methamphetamine addicts who scour the desert for anything that can be sold to support their habit.Īs for the site’s controversy, Christensen’s assessment was pointed. ![]() ![]() I reached out to a former Army paratrooper who lived in neighboring Yermo, had worked as Louis Leakey’s bodyguard and had been hired out of retirement to be Calico’s last caretaker. Oberlander was getting up in age, and only a few others were around to talk about the site and its legacy. Sensing that Calico’s final chapter was being written, I picked up the story again. I got the impression that everyone wished Calico would just go away, except for Budinger, who on April 10 of this year sent me an email with a scan of a certified letter he had received from the Bureau of Land Management detailing plans to remove the buildings and fill in most of the pits. She died before that interview could take place, and I was getting nowhere. Anything you print will be questionable, because the dating of the site is still open for debate.” When the paper is released, I will give you an interview. “We are in the middle of a paper that settles the dating of the site once and for all. “Just hold on to the article,” she responded by email. Adella Schroth was Calico’s project director, and she too avoided me. I chalked it up to federal bureaucracy, but they weren’t the only ones reluctant to help. “Expect to have a response by the end of the week.” “Staff has been extremely busy, coupled with leave,” was one reply. I submitted questions, requested a tour and, as much as the field director promised to get back to me, never got the answers I needed. After all, they were in charge with keeping the place safe. Bureau of Land Management’s office in Barstow. In 2017, I learned that the site had been vandalized, and I contacted the U.S. The Calico story, though, remained in my notebooks. I also knew from reporting about a dig in San Diego - where early humans stood about 140,000 years ago - that archaeology can be blood sport, especially if dating is involved. His audiences there loved him anyhow as a person and a visiting super-star, but the local archaeological community worshiped him even more because he gave them, with the guarantee of his personal infallibility, what they had always wanted: Early Man of their very own.” Her explanation was simple: “Of all the places where Louis could count on the adulation that he craved in these latter years, nowhere exceeded the levels reached in Southern California. ![]() Even Leakey’s wife, the equally esteemed archaeologist Mary Leakey, recounted in her memoir how she lost her professional respect for him over the Calico debate. The bigger the questions, the bigger the drama, and the participants of this story took nothing in half measure. Calico, once a strange and marvelous beacon of science, had become a hot potato, as unlikely a stage for women and men asking the Big Questions - who we are and how we got here - as I could find. I was less interested in the science than in the devotion. With tales of conspiracy, mishandled funds and even federal neglect, I knew I had found a good story, no matter how buried it was in arcane scientific details, thermoluminescence dating, electronic spin resonance and superconducting quantum interference. “I feel he has been treated unjustly by the board of directors of the Friends of Calico. “I have collaborated off and on with Fred over Calico since the mid-1970s,” he wrote me. The Calico site in the Mojave Desert for decades attracted expert and amateur archaeologists, digging for evidence that early man roamed the area 200,000 years ago. For Subscribers Column One: A riddle in the California desert, and one man’s fight to solve it and save himself
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