During lunch at Chez Panisse, Tim White draws a map of places I should visit in Ethiopia, on the paper table mat. The famed professor agrees to rendezvous with me at the National Museum in Addis Ababa after he returns from his upcoming field trip. Watching him sketch the suggested route, I'm fixated on the areas he zigs around. Earlier, before I could specify the dates I'd be in Ethiopia, White had refused to allow me to visit him in the field. "There's no way you could find your way in or out," he'd said. Taking this taunt as a challenge, I analyze his approved route now unfolding on the table.

White is in no rush to attract others to his hunting grounds. His findings, when made public, are subjected to scrutiny by competitors. He and his team often take six careful years from discovery to publication. White is a treasure hunter competing in perhaps the nastiest, most competitive field in academe.

How do I describe Berkeley's star paleoanthropologist, someone whose profession I can barely pronounce? To become a top predator, White has mastered anthropology, archaeology, biology, dentistry, ecology, ethnography, and more. Simply put, he and his colleagues try to figure out, through the archaeological record, how the human mammal came to be. White's fingerprints are all over such skeletons as the famous Lucy (discovered by Donald Johanson, et al.); Lucy's 4.2 million-year-old, big-toothed ape-man ancestor; her 2.5 million-year-old descendant who might have been the first to butcher animals with tools; and the 160,000-year-old Herto hominids, two adults and a child, our most anatomically similar ancestors. White also helped uncover the tracks of three hominids who walked upright for 77 feet in damp volcanic ash 3.7 million years ago. If a Nobel Prize were awarded for the science of human evolution, White would already have won several. A small, balding, bespectacled man, White possesses a wiliness and ferocity that lurk beneath a broad, impenetrable smile.

White's pen suddenly turns south of Addis Ababa to a ford on the Upper Awash River. "You really should visit the open-air museum at Melka Kunture."

Lunch comes to a lively close. The paleoanthropologist and the reporter see eye to competitive eye on human nature. A happy handshake is accompanied by forced cheer: "See you at the National Museum!"

My first stop in Ethiopia is the Museum of Melka Kunture, as Professor White had recommended, but with a twist that he hadn't. I hire a guide named Tshoman, who says he knows White and has recently helped caravan his team to the Afar Depression down the Awash River. Early one morning we drive south out of Addis Ababa, a bustling city filled with poverty and political intrigue, and pass through a treeless landscape to reach Melka Kunture.

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