Flash floods have marooned his vehicles in hip-deep pools of mud. Grazing wars between groups of nomads have blocked access to promising fossil beds. And campfire visits by snakes and tarantulas are so routine they rank as minor nuisances.

Yet nothing has stymied White's pursuit of knowledge—or thwarted his scientific ambitions—like the hard-eyed men in flip-flop sandals who, valuing doubloons above Darwin, set sail hundreds of miles away in skiffs stocked with machine guns and rope ladders: Somali pirates.

"No question, it's been a serious setback," says White, who has waited years, in vain, for a research vessel to drill crucial seabed cores off Somalia that would revolutionize the dating of East Africa's spectacular hominid finds. "Piracy has stopped oceanographic work