A little over a decade ago I was suffering through an extremely dull talk at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, with Professor Martin Trauth of Potsdam University. Like naughty schoolboys we were passing notes. One of these notes from Martin said that he was putting a team together to work in Kenya, and would I like to be involved? I said that I would. Little did we know then that ten years later we would have changed the way we think early humans evolved in Africa.
Martin’s plan was simple: find out what the climate of East Africa was like for our ancestors living in the heart of the Rift Valley. That, he thought, might help unlock one of the great mysteries of evolution: why