12 - ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW OUT OF AFRICA

• Reek's Skeleton

• The Kanjera Skulls and Kanam Jaw

• The Birth of Australopithecus

• Zinjanthropus

• Homo Habilis

• ATale of Two Humeri

• Discoveries of Richard Leakey

• The ER 813 Talus

• OH 62: Will the Real Homo Habilis Please Stand Up?

• Oxnard's Critique of Australopithecus

• Lucy in the Sand with Diatribes

• A. Afarensis: Overly Humanized?

• The Laetoli Footprints

• Black Skull, Black Thoughts

• Summary of Anomalous Evidence Related to Human Antiquity

The controversies surrounding Java man and Beijing man, what to speak of Castenedolo man and the European eoliths, have long since subsided. As for the disputing scientists, most of them are in their graves, their bones on the way to disintegration or fossilization.

But today Africa, the land of Australopithecus and Homo habilis, remains an active battlefield, with scientists skirmishing to establish their views on human origins.
 

RECK'S SKELETON

The first significant African discovery took place early in this century. In 1913, Professor Hans Reck, of Berlin University, conducted investigations at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, then German East Africa. While one of Reck's African collectors was searching for fossils, he saw a piece of bone sticking up from the earth. After removing the surface rubble, the collector saw parts of a complete and fully human skeleton embedded in the rock. He called Reck, who then had the skeleton taken out in a solid block of hard sediment.

The human skeletal remains, including a complete skull, had to be chipped out with hammers and chisels. The skeleton was then transported to Berlin.

Reck identified a sequence of five beds at Olduvai Gorge. The skeleton was from the upper part of Bed II, which is now considered to be 1.15 million years old. At Reck's site, the overlying layers (Beds III, IV, and V) had been worn away by erosion.

But Bed II was still covered by rubble from bright-red Bed III and from Bed V. Perhaps as little as 50 years ago, the site would have been covered by Beds III and V, including a hard limestone-like layer of calcrete. Bed IV was apparently removed by erosion before the deposition of Bed V.

Reck, understanding the significance of his find, carefully considered the possibility that the human skeleton had arrived in Bed II through burial.

Reck observed:

"The wall of the grave would have a definite border, an edge that would show in profile a division from the undisturbed stone. The grave filling would show an abnormal structure and heterogeneous mixture of excavated materials, including easily recognizable pieces of calcrete. Neither of these signs were to be found despite the most attentive inspection. Rather the stone directly around the skeleton was not distinguishable from the neighboring stone in terms of color, hardness, thickness of layers, structure, or order."

Louis Leakey examined Reck's skeleton in Berlin, but he judged it more recent than Reck had claimed. In 1931, Leakey and Reck visited the site where the skeleton had been found. Leakey was won over to Reck's view that the anatomically modern human skeleton was the same age as Bed II.

In February of 1932, zoologists C. Forster Cooper of Cambridge and D. M. S. Watson of the University of London said the completeness of the skeleton found by Reck clearly indicated it was a recent burial.

Leakey agreed with Cooper and Watson that Reck's skeleton had arrived in its position in Bed II by burial, but he thought the burial had taken place during Bed II times.

In a letter to Nature, Leakey argued that no more than 50 years ago the reddish-yellow upper part of Bed II would have been covered by an intact layer of bright-red Bed III.

If the skeleton had been buried after the deposition of Bed II, there should have been a mixture of bright-red and reddish-yellow sediments in the grave filling.

"I was lucky enough personally to examine the skeleton at Munich while it was still intact in its original matrix," wrote Leakey, "and could detect no trace whatever of such admixture or disturbance."

Cooper and Watson were still not satisfied. In June 1932, they said in a letter to Nature that red pebbles from Bed III may have lost their color. This would explain why Reck and Leakey did not see the Bed III pebbles in the matrix surrounding the skeleton. A. T. Hopwood, however, disagreed that Bed III pebbles would have lost their bright-red color. He pointed out that the top of Bed II, in which the skeleton was found, was also reddish and stated:

"The reddish color of the matrix is against the theory that any inclusions of Bed III would have been decolorized."

Despite the broadsides from Cooper and Watson, Reck and Leakey seemed to be holding their own. But in August 1932, P. G. H. Boswell, a geologist from the Imperial College in England, gave a perplexing report in the pages of Nature.

Professor T. Mollison had sent to Boswell from Munich a sample of what Mollison said was the matrix surrounding Reck's skeleton. Mollison, it may be noted, was not a completely neutral party. As early as 1929, he had expressed his belief that the skeleton was that of a Masai tribesman, buried in the not too distant past.

Boswell stated that the sample supplied by Mollison contained

"(a) pea-sized bright red pebbles like those of Bed 3, and

 (b) chips of concretionary limestone indistinguishable from that of Bed 5."

Boswell took all this to mean that the skeleton had been buried after the deposition of Bed V, which contains hard layers of steppe-lime, or calcrete.

The presence of the bright-red Bed III pebbles and Bed V limestone chips in the sample sent by Mollison certainly calls for some explanation. Reck and Leakey had both carefully examined the matrix at different times over a period of 20 years. They did not report any mixture of Bed III materials or chips of limestone like calcrete, even though they were specifically looking for such evidence. So it is remarkable that the presence of red pebbles and limestone chips should suddenly become apparent. It would appear that at least one of the participants in the discovery and the subsequent polemics was guilty of extremely careless observation—or cheating.

The debate about the age of Reck's skeleton became more complicated when Leakey brought new soil samples from Olduvai. Boswell and J. D. Solomon studied them at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. They reported their findings in the March 18, 1933 issue of Nature, in a letter signed also by Leakey, Reck, and Hopwood.

The letter contained this very intriguing statement:

"Samples of Bed II, actually collected at the 'man site,' at the same level and in the immediate vicinity of the place where the skeleton was found consist of pure and wholly typical Bed II material, and differ very markedly from the samples of matrix of the skeleton which were supplied by Prof. Mollison from Munich."

This suggests that the matrix sample originally supplied by Mollison to Boswell may not have been representative of the material closely surrounding Reck's skeleton.

But Reck and Leakey apparently concluded from the new observations that the matrix sample from Reck's skeleton was in fact some kind of grave filling, different from pure Bed II material. As far as we can tell, they offered no satisfactory explanation for their previous opinion that the skeleton had been found in pure, unmistakable Bed II materials.

Instead, both Reck and Leakey joined Boswell, Hopwood, and Solomon in concluding that "it seems highly probable that the skeleton was intrusive into Bed II and that the date of the intrusion is not earlier than the great unconformity which separates Bed V from the lower series."

It remains somewhat of a mystery why both Reck and Leakey changed their minds about a Bed II date for Reck's skeleton. Perhaps Reck was simply tired of fighting an old battle against odds that seemed more and more overwhelming. With the discovery of Beijing man and additional specimens of Java man, the scientific community had become more uniformly committed to the idea that a transitional ape-man was the only proper inhabitant of the Middle Pleistocene. An anatomically modern Homo sapiens skeleton in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge did not make sense except as a fairly recent burial.

Leakey, almost alone, remained very much opposed to the idea that Java man (Pithecanthropus) and Beijing man (Sinanthropus) were human ancestors. Furthermore, he had made additional discoveries in Kenya, at Kanam and Kanjera. The fossils he found there, in his opinion, provided indisputable evidence for Homo sapiens in the same period as Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus (and Reck's skeleton). So perhaps he abandoned the fight over Reck's highly controversial skeleton in order to strengthen support for his own recent finds at Kanam and Kanjera.

There is substantial circumstantial evidence in support of this hypothesis. Leakey's statement abandoning his previous position on the antiquity of Reck's skeleton appeared in Nature on the same day that a committee met to pass judgment on the Kanam and Kanjera finds. Some of the most vocal opponents of Reck's skeleton, such as Boswell, Solomon, Cooper, Watson, and Mollison, would be sitting on that committee.

Although Reck and Leakey gave up their earlier opinion that Reck's skeleton was as old as Bed II, their revised opinion that the skeleton was buried into Bed II during Bed V times still gives a potentially anomalous age for the fully human skeleton. The base of Bed V is about 400,000 years old, according to current estimates. Today, however, most scientists believe that humans like ourselves first appeared about 100,000 years ago, as shown by the Border Cave discoveries in South Africa.

Stone tools characterized as "Aurignacian" were found in the lower levels of Bed V.

Archeologists first used the term Aurignacian in connection with the finely made artifacts of Cro-Magnon man (Homo sapiens sapiens) found at Aurignac, France. According to standard opinion, tools of the Aurignacian type did not appear before 30,000 years ago. The tools lend support to the idea that anatomically modern humans, as represented by Reck's skeleton, were present in this part of Africa at least 400,000 years ago. Alternatively, one could attribute the tools to Homo erectus.

But this would mean granting to Homo erectus tool-making abilities substantially greater than scientists currently accept.

In 1935, in his book The Stone Age Races of Kenya, Leakey repeated his view that Reck's skeleton had been buried into Bed II from a land surface that existed during the formation of Bed V. But now he favored a time much later in that period. He thought that Reck's skeleton resembled skeletons found at Gamble's Cave, a site with an age of about 10,000 years. But from the standpoint of geology, all that could truthfully be said (granting the Bed V burial hypothesis) was that the skeleton could be anywhere from 400,000 to perhaps a few thousand years old.

Reiner Protsch later attempted to remedy this situation by dating Reck's skeleton itself, using the radiocarbon method. In 1974, he reported an age of 16,920 years. But there are several problems with this age determination.

First of all, it is not clear that the bone sample actually came from Reck's skeleton. The skull was considered too valuable to use for testing. And the rest of the skeleton had disappeared from a Munich museum during the Second World War. The museum director provided some small fragments of bone, which Protsch said were "most likely" part of the original skeleton.
 

From these fragments, Protsch was able to gather a sample of only 224 grams, about one third the normal size of a test sample. Although he obtained an age of 16,920 years for the human bone, he got very much different dates from other materials from the same site, some older and some younger.

Even if the sample actually belonged to Reck's skeleton, it could have been contaminated with recent carbon. This would have caused the sample to yield a falsely young age. By 1974, the remaining bone fragments from Reck's skeleton, if they in fact belonged to Reck's skeleton, had been lying around in a museum for over 60 years.

During this time, bacteria and other microorganisms, all containing recent carbon, could have thoroughly contaminated the bone fragments. The bones also could have been contaminated with recent carbon when they were still in the ground. Furthermore, the bones had been soaked in an organic preservative (Sapon), which contained recent carbon.

Protsch did not describe what chemical treatment he used to eliminate recent carbon 14 contributed by the Sapon and other contaminants. Thus we have no way of knowing to what degree the contamination from these sources was eliminated.

The radiocarbon method is applied only to collagen, the protein found in bones. This protein must be extracted from the rest of the bone by an extremely rigorous purification process. Scientists then determine whether a sample's amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) correspond to those found in collagen. If they do not, this suggests that amino acids may have entered the bone from outside. These amino acids, being of a different age than the bone, could yield a falsely young radiocarbon date.

Ideally, one should date each amino acid separately. If any of the amino acids yield dates different from any of the others, this suggests the bone is contaminated and not suitable for carbon 14 dating.

Concerning the radiocarbon tests on Reck's skeleton reported by Protsch, the laboratories that performed them could not have dated each amino acid separately. This requires a dating technique (accelerator mass spectrometry) that was not in use in the early 1970s. Neither could these labs have been aware of the stringent protein purification techniques now deemed necessary. We can only conclude that the radiocarbon date Protsch gave for Reck's skeleton is unreliable. In particular, the date could very well be falsely young.

There are documented cases of bones from Olduvai Gorge giving falsely young radiocarbon dates. For example, a bone from the Upper Ndutu beds yielded an age of 3,340 years. The Upper Ndutu beds, part of Bed V, are from 32,000 to 60,000 years old. A date of 3,340 years would thus be too young by at least a factor of ten.

In his report, Protsch said about Reck's skeleton:

"Theoretically, several facts speak against an early age of the hominid, such as its morphology."

This suggests that the skeleton's modern morphology was one of the main reasons Protsch doubted it was as old as Bed II or even the base of Bed V.

In our discussion of China, we introduced the concept of a probable date range as the fairest age indicator for controversial discoveries. The available evidence suggests that Reck's skeleton should be assigned a probable date range extending from the late Late Pleistocene (10,000 years) to the late Early Pleistocene (1.15 million years). There is much evidence that argues in favor of the original Bed II date proposed by Reck. Particularly strong is Reck's observation that the thin layers of Bed II sediment directly around the skeleton were undisturbed.

Also arguing against later burial is the rocklike hardness of Bed II. Reports favoring a Bed V date seem to be founded upon purely theoretical objections, dubious testimony, inconclusive test results, and highly speculative geological reasoning.

But, setting aside the questionable radiocarbon date, even these reports yield dates of up to 400,000 years for Reck's skeleton.

THE KANJERA SKULLS AND KANAM JAW

In 1932, Louis Leakey announced discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, near Lake Victoria in western Kenya. The Kanam jaw and Kanjera skulls, he believed, provided good evidence of Homo sapiens in the Early and Middle Pleistocene.

When Leaky visited Kanjera in 1932 with Donald MacInnes, they found stone hand axes, a human femur, and fragments of five human skulls, designated Kanjera 1-5. The fossil-bearing beds at Kanjera are equivalent to Bed IV at Olduvai Gorge, which is from 400,000 to 700,000 years old. But the morphology of the Kanjera skull pieces is quite modern.

At Kanam, Leakey initially found teeth of Mastodon and a single tooth of Deinotherium (an extinct elephant-like mammal), as well as some crude stone implements. On March 29, 1932, Leakey's collector, Juma Gitau, brought him a second Deinotherium tooth. Leakey told Gitau to keep digging in the same spot. Working a few yards from Leakey, Gitau hacked out a block of travertine (a hard calcium carbonate deposit) and broke it open with a pick. He saw a tooth protruding from a piece of travertine and showed it to MacInnes, who identified the tooth as human. MacInnes summoned Leakey.

Upon chipping away the travertine surrounding Gitau's find, they saw the front part of a human lower jaw with two premolars. Leakey thought the jaw from the Early Pleistocene Kanam formation was much like that of Homo sapiens, and he announced its discovery in a letter to Nature. The Kanam beds are at least 2.0 million years old.

For Leakey, the Kanam and Kanjera fossils showed that a hominid close to the modern human type had existed at the time of Java man and Beijing man, or even earlier. If he was correct, Java man and Beijing man (now Homo erectus) could not be direct human ancestors, nor could Piltdown man with his apelike jaw.

In March of 1933, the human biology section of the Royal Anthropological Institute met to consider Leakey's discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera. Chaired by Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, 28 scientists issued reports on four categories of evidence: geological, paleontological, anatomical, and archeological. The geology committee concluded that the Kanjera and Kanam human fossils were as old as the beds in which they were found. The paleontology committee said the Kanam beds were Early Pleistocene, whereas the Kanjera beds were no more recent than Middle Pleistocene.

The archeology committee noted the presence at both Kanam and Kanjera of stone tools in the same beds where the human fossils had been found. The anatomical committee said the Kanjera skulls exhibited "no characteristics inconsistent with the reference to the type Homo sapiens." The same was true of the Kanjera femur.

About the Kanam jaw, the anatomy experts said it was unusual in some respects. Yet they were "not able to point to any detail of the specimen that is incompatible with its inclusion in the type of the Homo sapiens."

Shortly after the 1933 conference gave Leakey its vote of confidence, geologist Percy Boswell began to question the age of the Kanam and Kanjera fossils. Leakey, who had experienced Boswell's attacks on the age of Reck's skeleton, decided to bring Boswell to Africa, hoping this would resolve his doubts. But all did not go well.

Upon returning to England, Boswell submitted to Nature a negative report on Kanam and Kanjera:

"Unfortunately, it has not proved possible to find the exact site of either discovery."

Boswell found the geological conditions at the sites confused. He said that

"the clayey beds found there had frequently suffered much disturbance by slumping." Boswell concluded that the "uncertain conditions of discovery . . . force me to place Kanam and Kanjera man in a 'suspense account.'"

Replying to Boswell's charges, Leakey said he had been able to show Boswell the locations where he had found his fossils. Leakey wrote:

"At Kanjera I showed him the exact spot where the residual mound of deposits had stood which yielded the Kanjera No. 3 skull in situ. . . . the fact that I did show Prof. Boswell the site is proved by a small fragment of bone picked up there in 1935 which fits one of the 1932 pieces."

Regarding the location of the Kanam jaw, Leakey said:

"We had originally taken a level section right across the Kanam West gullies, using a Zeiss-Watts level, and could therefore locate the position to within a very few feet—and, in fact, we did so."

Boswell suggested that even if the jaw was found in the Early Pleistocene formation at Kanam, it had entered somehow from above—by "slumping" of the strata or through a fissure.

To this Leakey later replied:

"I cannot accept this interpretation, for which there is no evidence. The state of preservation of the fossil is in every respect identical to that of the Lower [Early] Pleistocene fossils found with it."

Leakey said that Boswell told him he would have been inclined to accept the Kanam jaw as genuine had it not possessed a humanlike chin structure.

Nevertheless, Boswell's views prevailed. But in 1968 Philip V. Tobias of South Africa said,

"There is a good prima facie case to re-open the question of Kanjera."

And the Kanjera case was in fact reopened. Leakey's biographer Sonia Cole wrote:

"In September 1969 Louis attended a conference in Paris sponsored by UNESCO on the theme of the origins of Homo sapiens. . . . the 300 or so delegates unanimously accepted that the Kanjera skulls were Middle Pleistocene."

Tobias said about the Kanam jaw:

"Nothing that Boswell said really discredited or even weakened the claim of Leakey that the mandible belonged to the stratum in question."

Scientists have described the Kanam jaw, with its modern chin structure, in a multiplicity of ways. In 1932, a committee of English anatomists proclaimed that there was no reason the jaw should not be considered Homo sapiens. Sir Arthur Keith, a leading British anthropologist, also considered the Kanam jaw Homo sapiens. But in the 1940s Keith decided the jaw was most likely from an australopithecine.

In 1962, Philip Tobias said the Kanam jaw most closely resembled a late Middle Pleistocene jaw from Rabat in Morocco, and Late Pleistocene jaws such as those from the Cave of Hearths in South Africa and Dire-Dawa in Ethiopia. According to Tobias, these jaws display neanderthaloid features.

In 1960, Louis Leakey, retreating from his earlier view that the Kanam jaw was sapiens-like, said it represented a female Zinjanthropus. Leakey had found Zinjanthropus in 1959, at Olduvai Gorge. He briefly promoted this apelike creature as the first toolmaker, and thus the first truly humanlike being. Shortly thereafter, fossils of Homo habilis were found at Olduvai. Leakey quickly demoted Zinjanthropus from his status as toolmaker, placing him among the robust australopithecines (A. boisei).

In the early 1970s, Leakey's son Richard, working at Lake Turkana, Kenya, discovered fossil jaws of Homo habilis that resembled the Kanam jaw. Since the Lake Turkana Homo habilis jaws were discovered with a fauna similar to that at Kanam, the elder Leakey changed his mind once more, suggesting that the Kanam jaw could be assigned to Homo habilis.

That over the years scientists have attributed the Kanam jaw to almost every known hominid (Australopithecus, Australopithecus boisei, Homo habilis, Neanderthal man, early Homo sapiens, and anatomically modern Homo sapiens) shows the difficulties involved in properly classifying hominid fossil remains.

Tobias's suggestion that the Kanam jaw came from a variety of early Homo sapiens, with neanderthaloid features, has won wide acceptance. Yet as can be seen outlines of the Kanam mandible and other hominid mandibles, the contour of the Kanam mandible's chin region (h) is similar to that of the Border Cave specimen (f), recognized as Homo sapiens sapiens, and to that of a modern South African native (g). All three share two key features of the modern human chin, namely, an incurvation toward the top and a swelling outward at the base.

But even if one were to accept Tobias's view that the Kanam jaw was neanderthaloid, one would still not expect to discover Neanderthals in the Early Pleistocene, over 1.9 million years ago. Neanderthaloid hominids came into existence at most 400,000 years ago and persisted until about 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, according to most accounts.

To ascertain the age of the Kanam jaw and Kanjera skulls, K. P. Oakley of the British Museum performed fluorine-, nitrogen-, and uranium-content tests. Bones buried in the ground absorb fluorine. The Kanam jaw and the Kanjera skulls had about the same fluorine content as other bones from the Early and Middle Pleistocene formations where they were found. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the human bones at Kanam and Kanjera are as old as the faunal remains at those sites.

Nitrogen is a component of bone protein. Bones normally tend to lose nitrogen over time. Oakley found that a Kanjera 4 skull fragment showed just a trace of nitrogen (0.01 percent), while a Kanjera 3 skull fragment showed none. Neither of the two animal fossils tested showed any nitrogen. The presence of "measurable traces" of nitrogen in the Kanjera 4 skull fragment meant, said Oakley, that all the human fossils were "considerably younger" than the Kanjeran fauna.

But certain deposits, such as clay, preserve nitrogen, sometimes for millions of years. So perhaps the Kanjera 4 fragment was protected from complete nitrogen loss by clay. In any case, the Kanjera 3 fragment, like the animal samples, had no nitrogen. So it is possible that all the bones were of the same age.

As shown in Table 12.1, the uranium content values for the Kanjera human fossils (8-47 parts per million) overlapped the values for the Kanjeran fauna (26-216 parts per million). This could mean they were of the same age.

But the human bones averaged 22 parts per million while the mammalian fauna averaged 136 parts per million. To Oakley, the substantial difference between the averages meant that the human bones were "considerably younger" than the animal bones. Similar uranium-content results were obtained at Kanam.

But Oakley himself pointed out that the uranium content of ground water can vary considerably from place to place. For example, Late Pleistocene animal bones from Kugata, near Kanam, have more uranium than the Early Pleistocene bones at Kanam.

Significantly, the uranium-content values that Oakley reported in 1974 were apparently not the first he had obtained.

In a paper published in 1958, Oakley said, immediately after discussing the uranium-content testing of the Kanam jaw:

"Applied to the Kanjera bones our tests did not show any discrepancy between the human skulls and the associated fauna."

It would appear that Oakley was not satisfied with these early tests and later performed additional tests on the Kanjera bones, obtaining results that were more to his liking.

Our review of the chemical testing of the Kanam and Kanjera fossils leads us to the following conclusions. The fluorine - and nitrogen - content tests gave results consistent with the human bones being as old as their accompanying faunas. This interpretation can nevertheless be challenged. The uranium-content test gave results consistent with the human bones being younger than their accompanying faunas. But here again, if one chooses to challenge this interpretation, one will find ample grounds to do so.

All in all, the results of chemical and radiometric tests do not eliminate the possibility that the Kanam and Kanjera human fossils are contemporary with their accompanying faunas. The Kanjera skulls, said to be anatomically modern, would thus be equivalent in age to Olduvai Bed IV, which is 400,000 to 700,000 years old. The taxonomic status of the Kanam jaw is uncertain. Recent workers hesitate to call it anatomically modern, although this designation cannot be ruled out completely.

If it is as old as the Kanam fauna, which is older than Olduvai Gorge Bed I, then the Kanam mandible would be over 1.9 million years old.
 

THE BIRTH OF AUSTRALOPITHECUS

In 1924, Josephine Salmons noticed a fossil baboon skull sitting above the fireplace in a friend's home. Salmons, a student of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, took the specimen to her professor, Dr. Raymond A. Dart.

The baboon skull given to Dart by Salmons was from a limestone quarry at Buxton, near a town called Taung, about 200 miles southwest of Johannesburg. Dart asked his friend Dr. R. B. Young, a geologist, to visit the quarry and see what else might be found. Young collected some fossil-bearing chunks and sent them to Dart.

Two crates of fossils arrived at Dart's home on the very day a friend's wedding was to be held there. Dart's wife pleaded with him to leave the fossils alone until after the wedding, but Dart opened the crates. In the second crate, Dart saw something that astonished him: "I found the virtually complete cast of the interior of a skull among them. This brain cast was as big as that of a large gorilla." Dart then found another piece of rock that appeared to contain the facial bones.

After the wedding guests departed, Dart began the arduous task of detaching the bones from their stony matrix.

Without proper instruments, he used his wife's knitting needles to carefully chip away the stone.

"What emerged," wrote Dart, "was a baby's face, an infant with a full set of milk teeth and its permanent molars just in the process of erupting. I doubt if there was any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my Taung baby on that Christmas."

After freeing the bones, Dart reconstructed the skull. He characterized the Taung baby's brain as unexpectedly large, about 500 cubic centimeters. The average brain capacity of a large male adult gorilla is only about 600 cubic centimeters. Dart noted the absence of a brow ridge and thought that the teeth displayed some humanlike features.

Dart also noted that the foramen magnum, the opening for the spinal cord, was set toward the center of the base of the skull, as in human beings, rather than toward the rear, as in adult apes. Dart took this to indicate the creature had walked upright, which meant the Taung specimen was, in his eyes, clearly a human ancestor.

Dart sent a report to Nature, the prestigious British science journal.

"The specimen," said Dart, "is of importance because it exhibits an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man."

From the accompanying animal fossils, he estimated his find's age at 1 million years. He named his Taung baby Australopithecus africanus—the southern ape of Africa. Australopithecus, he believed, was ancestral to all other hominid forms.

In England, Sir Arthur Keith and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward received the report from Dart with utmost caution. Keith thought Australopithecus belonged with the chimpanzees and gorillas.

Grafton Elliot Smith was even more critical.

In May 1925, in a lecture delivered at University College, Smith stated:

"It is unfortunate that Dart had no access to skulls of infant chimpanzees, gorillas, or orangs of an age corresponding to that of the Taung skull, for had such material been available he would have realized that the posture and poise of the head, the shape of the jaws, and many details of the nose, face, and cranium upon which he relied for proof of his contention that Australopithecus was nearly akin to man, were essentially identical with the conditions met in the infant gorilla and chimpanzee."

Grafton Elliot Smith's critique remains valid even today. As we shall see, despite the enshrinement of Australopithecus as an ancestor of human beings, several scientists remain doubtful.

Dart was dismayed by the cool reception he received from the British scientific establishment. For many years, he remained silent and stopped hunting for fossils. British scientists, led by Sir Arthur Keith, maintained their opposition to Dart's Australopithecus throughout the 1930s. Piltdown man, believed to be similar in geological age to the Taung specimen, entered Keith's calculations. The skull of Piltdown man was like that of Homo sapiens. This fact argued against Australopithecus, with its apelike skull, being in the line of human ancestry.

When Dart retired from the world stage, his friend Dr. Robert Broom took up the battle to establish Australopithecus as a human ancestor. From the beginning, Broom displayed keen interest in Dart's discovery. Soon after the Taung baby made his appearance, Broom rushed to Dart's laboratory.

Dart said,

"he strode over to the bench on which the skull reposed and dropped on his knees 'in adoration of our ancestor,' as he put it."

British science, however, demanded an adult specimen of Australopithecus before it would kneel in adoration. Early in 1936, Broom vowed to find one.

On August 17, 1936, G. W. Barlow, the supervisor of the Sterkfontein limestone quarry, gave Broom a brain cast of an adult australopithecine. Broom later went to the spot where the brain cast had turned up and recovered several skull fragments. From these he reconstructed the skull, naming its owner Plesianthropus transvaalensis. The deposits in which the fossil was discovered are thought to be between 2.2 and 3.0 million years old.

More discoveries followed, including the lower part of a femur (TM 1513). In 1946, Broom and G. W. H. Schepers described this femur as essentially human. W. E. Le Gros Clark, initially skeptical of this description, later admitted that the femur "shows a resemblance to the femur of Homo which is so close as to amount to practical identity."

This estimation was reconfirmed in 1981 by Christine Tardieu, who said the key diagnostic features of the Sterkfontein femur are "characteristic of modern Man." Since the TM 1513 femur was found by itself, it is not clear that it belongs to an australopithecine. It is possible, therefore, that it could belong to a more advanced hominid, perhaps one resembling anatomically modern humans.

On June 8, 1938, Barlow gave Broom a fragment of a palate with a single molar attached. When Broom asked from where it had come, Barlow was evasive. Some days later, Broom again visited Barlow and insisted that he reveal the source of the fossil.

Barlow told Broom that Gert Terblanche, a local schoolboy, had given the bone fragment to him. Broom obtained some teeth from Gert, and together they went to the nearby Kromdraai farm, where the boy had gotten the teeth. There Broom collected some skull fragments. After reconstructing the partial skull, Broom saw it was different from the Sterkfontein australopithecine. It had a larger jaw and bigger teeth. He called the new australopithecine creature Paranthropus robustus. The Kromdraai site is now considered to be approximately 1.0 to 1.2 million years old.

Broom also found at Kromdraai a fragment of humerus (the bone of the upper arm) and a fragment of ulna (one of the bones of the lower arm).

Although he attributed them to the robust australopithecine called Paranthropus, he said:

"Had they been found isolated probably every anatomist in the world would say that they were undoubtedly human."

An analysis done by H. M. McHenry in 1972 puts the TM 1517 humerus from Kromdraai "within the human range."

In McHenry's study, a robust australopithecine humerus from Koobi Fora, Kenya, fell outside the human range. So perhaps the TM 1517 humerus belonged to something other than a robust australopithecine. It is not impossible that the Kromdraai humerus and ulna, like the Sterkfontein femur, belonged to more advanced hominids, perhaps resembling anatomically modern humans.

World War II interrupted Broom's excavation work in South Africa. After the war, at Swartkrans, Robert Broom and J. T. Robinson found fossils of a robust australopithecine called Paranthropus crassidens (large-toothed near-man). This creature had large strong teeth and a bony crest on top of the skull. The crest served as the point of attachment for big jaw muscles.

Broom and Robinson also found the jaw of another kind of hominid in the Swartkrans cave.

They attributed the jaw (SK15), smaller and more humanlike than that of Paranthropus crassidens, to a new hominid called Telanthropus capensis. Member 1 at Swartkrans, where all of the Paranthropus bones were found, is now said to be 1.2 to 1.4 million years old. Member 2, where the SK 15 Telanthropus mandible was found, is said to be 300,000 to 500,000 years old. In 1961, Robinson reclassified the Swartkrans jaw as Homo erectus.

Broom and Robinson found another humanlike lower jaw at Swartkrans. This fragmentary mandible (SK 45) came from the main deposit containing the Paranthropus fossils.

Broom and Robinson said in 1952:

"In shape it is more easily matched or approached by many modern Homo jaws than by that of Telanthropus."

Robinson later referred the SK 45 jaw to Telanthropus and then to Homo erectus. But there are reasons, admittedly not unclouded, to consider other possibilities.

In the postwar years, Broom also found another australopithecine skull (St 5) at Sterkfontein. Later he discovered further remains of an adult female australopithecine (St 14)—including parts of the pelvis, vertebral column, and legs. Their morphology, along with certain features of the Sterkfontein skulls, demonstrated, in Broom's opinion, that the australopithecines had walked erect.

In 1925, Raymond A. Dart investigated a tunnel at Makapansgat, South Africa. Noting the presence of blackened bones, Dart concluded hominids had used fire there. In 1945, Philip V. Tobias, then Dart's graduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand, found the skull of an extinct baboon in the cave deposits of Makapansgat and called it to Dart's attention. In 1947, Dart himself went back out into the field, after a lapse of two decades, to hunt for Australopithecus bones at Makapansgat.

At Makapansgat, Dart found australopithecine skull fragments and other bones, along with more signs of fire. Dart therefore called the creature who lived there Australopithecus prometheus, after the Titan who stole fire from the gods. Today Australopithecus prometheus is classified, along with the Taung and Sterkfontein specimens, as Australopithecus africanus, distinct from the robust australopithecines of Kromdraai and Swartkrans.

Dart discovered 42 baboon skulls at Makapansgat, 27 of which had smashed fronts. Seven more showed blows on the left front side.

From this evidence, Dart created a lurid portrait of Australopithecus prometheus as a killer ape-man, bashing in the heads of baboons with primitive bone tools and cooking their flesh over fires in the Makapansgat cave.

"Man's predecessors," said Dart, "differed from living apes in being confirmed killers; carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring their writhing flesh."

Today, however, paleoanthropologists characterize Australopithecus as merely a scavenger, not a hunter and maker of fire.

Nevertheless, the new discoveries by Broom and Dart convinced influential scientists, especially in Great Britain, that Australopithecus was not just a variety of fossil ape but was a genuine human ancestor.
 

ZINJANTHROPUS

The next important discoveries were made by Louis Leakey and his second wife Mary. On July 17, 1959, Mary Leakey came across the shattered skull of a young male hominid in Bed I of Olduvai Gorge at site FLK. When the skull was pieced together, Louis and Mary Leakey saw that the creature had a saggital crest, a bony ridge running lengthwise along the top of the skull. In this respect, it was very much like Australopithecus robustus.

Leakey nevertheless created a new species for this hominid, partly because its teeth were bigger than those of the South African robustus specimens. Leakey called the new find Zinjanthropus boisei. Zinj is a name for East Africa and boisei refers to Mr. Charles Boise, one of the Leakeys' early financial backers. Along with the skull, Leakey found stone tools, causing him to call Zinjanthropus the first stone toolmaker, and hence the first "true man."

Leakey became the first superstar that paleoanthropology had seen in a while. The National Geographic Society honored Leakey with funds, publication of lavishly illustrated articles, television specials, and worldwide speaking tours.

But despite an outpouring of publicity, the reign of Zinjanthropus was all too brief. Leakey's biographer, Sonia Cole, wrote:

"Granted that Louis had to persuade the National Geographic Society that in Zinj he had a likely candidate for 'the first man' in order to ensure their continued support—but need he have stuck out his neck quite so far?

 

Even a layman looking at the skull could not be fooled: Zinj, with his gorilla-like crest on the top of the cranium and his low brow, was quite obviously far more like the robust australopithecines of South Africa than he was like modern man—to whom, quite frankly, he bears no resemblance at all."

HOMO HABILIS

In 1960, about a year after the discovery of Zinjanthropus, Leakey's son Jonathan found the skull of another hominid (OH 7) nearby. In addition to the skull, the OH 7 individual included the bones of a hand. Also in 1960, the bones of a hominid foot (OH 8) were found. In succeeding years, more discoveries followed, mostly teeth and fragments of jaw and skull. The fossil individuals were given colorful nicknames: Johnny's Child, George, Cindy, and Twiggy. Some of the bones were found in the lower part of Bed II of Olduvai Gorge.

Philip Tobias, the South African anatomist, gave the OH 7 skull a capacity of 680 cc, far larger than Zinjanthropus at 530 cc, and larger even than the biggest australopithecine skull, at roughly 600 cc. It was, however, around 100 cc less than the smallest Homo erectus.

Louis Leakey decided he had now come upon the real toolmaker of the lower levels of Olduvai, the real first true human. His bigger brain confirmed his status. Leakey called the creature Homo habilis, which means "handy man."

After the discovery of Homo habilis, Zinjanthropus was demoted to Australopithecus boisei, a somewhat more robust variety of Australopithecus robustus. Both of these robust australopithecines had saggital crests, and are regarded not as human ancestors but as evolutionary offshoots that eventually became extinct.

The whole business of saggital crests complicates matters somewhat. Male gorillas and some male chimpanzees also have saggital crests, whereas the females of these species do not.

Mary Leakey therefore said in 1971:

"The possibility that A. robustus and A. africanus represent the male and female of a single species deserves serious consideration."

If the possibility raised by Mary Leakey were found to be correct, this would mean that generations of experts have been wildly mistaken about the australopithecines.

With the discovery at Olduvai Gorge of Homo habilis, a creature contemporary with the early australopithecines but with a bigger brain, Louis Leakey believed he had excellent evidence supporting his view that Australopithecus was not in the direct line of human ancestry. The australopithecines would be merely a side branch. And because Homo erectus was thought to be a descendant of Australopithecus, Homo erectus would also be removed from the line of human ancestry.

But what about the Neanderthals? These, say some authorities, show clearly an evolutionary transition between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.

But Leakey had another explanation:

"Is it not possible that they are all variants of the result of crossbreeding between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus. One might object that such crossbreeding would have yielded hybrids that were unable to reproduce."

But Leakey pointed out that American bison cross fertilely with ordinary cattle.
 

A TALE OF TWO HUMERI

In 1965, Bryan Patterson and W. W. Howells found a surprisingly modern-looking hominid humerus (upper arm bone) at Kanapoi, Kenya. In 1977, French workers found a similar humerus at Gombore, Ethiopia.

The Kanapoi humerus fragment, consisting of the intact lower (or distal) part of the bone, was found on the surface. But the deposit from which the bone apparently came was about 4.5 million years old.

Patterson and Howells found that the Kanapoi humerus was different from the humeri of gorillas, chimpanzees, and australopithecines but similar to those of humans. They noted that "there are individuals in our sample of man on whom measurements . . . of Kanapoi Hominoid I can be duplicated almost exactly."

Patterson and Howells would not have dreamed of suggesting that the Kanapoi humerus belonged to an anatomically modern human. Nevertheless, if an anatomically modern human had died at Kanapoi 4.0-4.5 million years ago, he or she might have left a humerus exactly like the one they found.

Further confirmation of the humanlike morphology of the Kanapoi humerus came from anthropologists Henry M. McHenry and Robert S. Corruccini of the University of California. They concluded that "the Kanapoi humerus is barely distinguishable from modern Homo" and "shows the early emergence of a Homo-like elbow in every subtle detail."

In a 1975 study, physical anthropologist C. E. Oxnard agreed with this analysis. He stated: "we can confirm clearly that the fossil from Kanapoi is very humanlike." This led Oxnard to suggest, as did Louis Leakey, that the australopithecines were not in the main line of human evolution. Keeping Australopithecus as a human ancestor would result in a very unlikely progression from the humanlike Kanapoi humerus, to the markedly less humanlike humerus of Australopithecus, and then to one more humanlike again.

The Gombore humerus, given an age of about 1.5 million years, was found along with crude stone tools. In 1981, Brigitte Senut said that the Gombore humerus "cannot be differentiated from a typical modern human." So now we seem to have two very ancient and humanlike humeri to add to our list of evidence challenging the currently accepted scenario of human evolution.

These are the Kanapoi humerus at 4.0-4.5 million years in Kenya and the Gombore humerus at more than 1.5 million years in Ethiopia.

They support the view that human beings of modern type have coexisted with other humanlike and apelike creatures for a very long time.
 

DISCOVERIES OF RICHARD LEAKEY

In 1972 Louis Leakey's son Richard found at Lake Turkana, Kenya, a shattered hominid skull. Richard's wife Meave, a zoologist, reconstructed the skull, which was designated ER 1470. Its cranial capacity was over 810 cc, bigger than the robust australopithecines. Richard Leakey initially hesitated to designate a species for the ER 1470 skull but eventually decided to call it Homo habilis.

The stratum yielding the skull lay below the KBS Tuff, a volcanic deposit with a potassium-argon age of 2.6 million years. The skull itself was given an age of 2.9 million years, as old as the oldest australopithecines. The KBS Tuff's age was later challenged, with critics favoring an age of less than 2 million years.

Some distance from where the ER 1470 skull had been found, but at the same level, John Harris, a paleontologist from the Kenya National Museum, discovered two quite humanlike femurs. Harris summoned Richard Leakey, who later reported that "these femurs are unlike those of Australopithecus, and astonishingly similar to those of modern man." Other workers found the femurs different from those of Homo erectus.

The first femur, with associated fragments of tibia and fibula, was designated ER 1481 and the other ER 1472. An additional fragment of femur was designated ER 1475. They were all attributed to Homo habilis.

But Leakey stated in a scientific journal that these leg bones "cannot be readily distinguished from H. sapiens if one considers the range of variation known for this species." In a National Geographic article, Leakey repeated this view, saying the leg bones were "almost indistinguishable from those of Homo sapiens." Other scientists agreed with Leakey's analysis. B. A. Wood, anatomist at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in London, stated that the femurs "belong to the 'modern human walking' locomotor group."

Although most scientists would never dream of it, one could consider attributing the Koobi Fora femurs to a hominid very much like modern Homo sapiens, living in Africa about 2 million years ago.

The ER 1472 and ER 1481 femurs show that distinctly anomalous discoveries are not confined to the nineteenth century. They have continued to occur with astonishing regularity up to the present day, right under our very noses, so to speak, although hardly anyone recognizes them for what they are. In Africa alone, we are building up quite a catalog: Reck's skeleton, the Kanam jaw, the Kanjera skulls, the Kanapoi humerus, the Gombore humerus, and now the Lake Turkana femurs.

All have been either attributed to Homo sapiens or described as being very humanlike.

Except for the Middle Pleistocene Kanjera skulls, all were discovered in Early Pleistocene or Pliocene contexts.

THE ER 813 TALUS

In 1974, B. A. Wood described a talus (ankle bone) found at Lake Turkana. It lay between the KBS Tuff and the overlying Koobi Fora Tuff. Wood compared the fossil talus, designated ER 813, with those of modern humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and other arboreal primates. "The fossil aligned with the modern human tali," said Wood.

The humanlike ER 813 talus is 1.5 to 2.0 million years old, roughly contemporary with creatures designated as Australopithecus robustus, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis.

In a subsequent report, Wood said his tests confirmed "the similarity of KNM-ER 813 with modern human bones," showing it to be "not significantly different from the tali of modern bushmen." One could therefore consider the possibility that the KNM-ER 813 talus belonged to an anatomically modern human in the Early Pleistocene or Late Pliocene.

If the KNM-ER 813 talus really did belong to a creature very much like modern human beings, it fits, like the ER 1481 and ER 1472 femurs, into a continuum of such finds reaching back millions of years.

This would eliminate Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus as human ancestors.
 

OH 62: WILL THE REAL HOMO HABILIS PLEASE STAND UP?

Artists, working from fossils and reports supplied by paleoanthropologists, have typically depicted Homo habilis as having an essentially humanlike body except for its apelike head.

This highly speculative portrait of Homo habilis persisted until 1987. In that year, Tim White and Don Johanson reported they had found at Olduvai Gorge the first Homo habilis individual (OH 62) with the bones of the body clearly associated with the skull. The skeletal remains showed the creature was only 3.5 feet tall and had relatively long arms. Drawings of the new Homo habilis were decidedly more apelike than those of the past.

Johanson and his coworkers concluded it was likely that scientists had incorrectly attributed to Homo habilis many limb bones discovered prior to 1987.

The OH 62 find supports our suggestion that the ER 1481 and ER 1472 femurs from Koobi Fora, described as very much like those of modern Homo sapiens, might have belonged to anatomically modern humans living in Africa during the Late Pliocene. Some scientists attributed them to Homo habilis. But the new view of Homo habilis rules this out. Could the femurs perhaps belong to Homo erectus? G. E. Kennedy, for example, assigned the ER 1481 femur to Homo erectus. But E. Trinkhaus noted that key measurements of this bone, with one exception, are within the range of anatomically modern human femurs.

The discoverers of OH 62 had to grapple with the evolutionary link between the new, more apelike Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The two species are separated by only 200,000 or so years. But the H. habilis-H. erectus transition involves some rather extreme morphological changes, including a big change in size. Richard Leakey, applying normal human growth patterns, calculated that an adolescent Homo erectus discovered in 1984 (KNM-WT 15000) would have grown to over 6 feet tall as an adult.

The adult OH 62, on the other hand, was only about 3.25 feet tall. Altogether, an evolutionary leap from small, apelike OH 62 to big, more humanlike KNM-WT 15000 in less than 200,000 years seems implausible.

Advocates of the much-debated punctuational model of evolution, however, can easily accept the transition. Unlike the traditional gradualists, punctuationalists assert that evolution proceeds by rapid episodes of change interrupted by long periods of stasis.

Punctuationalism can, therefore, accommodate a variety of troublesome evolutionary anomalies, such as the habilis-to-erectus transition.

"The very small body size of the OH 62 individual," said its discoverers, "suggests that views of human evolution positing incremental body size increase through time may be rooted in gradualistic preconceptions rather than fact."

But punctuational views may also be rooted in preconception rather than fact. The paleontological facts, considered in their entirety, suggest that various ape-man-like and humanlike beings, including some resembling modern humans, coexisted throughout the Pleistocene, and earlier.

It was not only new evidence such as OH 62 that challenged the long-accepted picture of Homo habilis. Previously discovered fossil evidence relating to Homo habilis, originally interpreted by some authorities as very humanlike, was later characterized by others as quite apelike.

As mentioned earlier, a fairly complete foot skeleton, designated OH 8, was found in Bed I at Olduvai Gorge. Dated at 1.7 million years, the OH 8 foot was attributed to Homo habilis. In 1964, M. H. Day and J. R. Napier said the OH 8 foot very much resembled that of Homo sapiens, thus contributing to the overall humanlike picture of Homo habilis.

But O. J. Lewis, anatomist at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London, demonstrated that the OH 8 foot was more like that of chimpanzees and gorillas. He considered the foot to be arboreal, adapted to life in trees. This poses a problem. It certainly does not serve the propaganda purposes of evolutionists to have the public visualizing a supposed human ancestor like Homo habilis climbing trees with an aboreally adapted foot rather than walking tall and brave across the African savannahs.

From Lewis's study of the OH 8 foot, one could conclude that Homo habilis was much more apelike than most scientists have tended to believe. The OH 62 discovery supports this view. Another possible conclusion: the OH 8 foot did not belong to Homo habilis but to an australopithecine. This view was favored by Lewis.

Over the years, different scientists have described the OH 8 foot skeleton as humanlike, apelike, intermediate between human and ape, distinct from both human and ape, and orangutan-like. This demonstrates once more an important characteristic of paleoanthropological evidence—it is often subject to multiple, contradictory interpretations. Partisan considerations often determine which view prevails at any given point in time.

The OH 7 hand was also found at Olduvai Gorge, as part of the type specimen of Homo habilis. In 1962, J. R. Napier described the hand as quite human in some of its features, especially the fingertips. As in the case of the OH 8 foot, subsequent studies showed the OH 7 hand to be very apelike, calling into question either its attribution to Homo habilis or the generally accepted humanlike picture of Homo habilis, which the original interpretation of the OH 7 hand helped create. The apelike character of the hand suggested to Randall L. Susman and Jack T. Stern that it was used in "in suspensory climbing behavior."

In others words, Homo habilis, or whatever creature owned the OH 7 hand, may have spent much of its time hanging by its arms from tree limbs. This apelike image differs from the very humanlike portrait of Homo habilis and other supposed human ancestors one usually encounters in Time-Life picture books and National Geographic Society television specials.

In light of the contradictory evidence connected with Homo habilis, some researchers have proposed that there was no justification for "creating" this species in the first place.

If the bones attributed to Homo habilis did not really belong to this species, then what did they represent? T. J. Robinson argued that Homo habilis had been mistakenly derived from a mixture of skeletal elements belonging to Australopithecus africanus and Homo erectus. Others have suggested that the Homo habilis bones are all australopithecine.

So in the end, we find that Homo habilis is about as substantial as a desert mirage, appearing now humanlike, now apelike, now real, now unreal, according to the tendency of the viewer.

Taking the many conflicting views into consideration, we find it most likely that the Homo habilis material belongs to more than one species, including a small, apelike, arboreal australopithecine (OH 62 and some of the Olduvai specimens), a primitive species of Homo (ER 1470 skull), and anatomically modern humans (ER1481 and ER 1472 femurs).
 

OXNARD'S CRITIQUE OF AUSTRALOPITHECUS

Homo habilis is not the only human ancestor to come under sustained criticism. According to most paleoanthropologists, Australopithecus was a direct human ancestor, with a very humanlike body.

Advocates of this view have also asserted that Australopithecus walked erect, in a manner practically identical to modern human beings. But right from the very start, some researchers objected to this depiction of Australopithecus. Influential English scientists, including Sir Arthur Keith, said that the Australopithecus was not a hominid but a variety of ape.

This negative view persisted until the early 1950s, when the combined effect of further Australopithecus finds and the fall of Piltdown man created a niche in mainstream paleoanthropological thought for a humanlike Australopithecus.
But even after Australopithecus won mainstream acceptance as a hominid and direct human ancestor, opposition continued. Louis Leakey held that Australopithecus was an early and very apelike offshoot from the main line of human evolution. Later, his son Richard Leakey took much the same stance.

In the early 1950s, Sir Solly Zuckerman published extensive biometric studies showing Australopithecus was not as humanlike as imagined by those who favored putting this creature in the lineage of Homo sapiens. From the late 1960s through the 1990s, Charles E. Oxnard, employing multivariate statistical analysis, renewed and amplified the line of attack begun by Zuckerman.

According to Oxnard,

"it is rather unlikely that any of the Australopithecines... can have any direct phylogenetic link with the genus Homo."

Oxnard found the brain, teeth, and skull of Australopithecus to be quite like those of apes. The shoulder bone appeared to be adapted for suspending the body from the limbs of trees. The hand bones were curved like those of the orangutan. The pelvis appeared to be adapted for quadrupedal walking and acrobatic behavior.

The same was true of the femur and ankle structure.

"Pending further evidence," wrote Oxnard in 1975, "we are left with the vision of intermediately sized animals, at home in the trees, capable of climbing, performing degrees of acrobatics and perhaps arm suspension."

In 1973, Zuckerman and Oxnard presented a paper at a symposium of the Zoological Society of London in 1973. At the conclusion of the symposium, Zuckerman made some important remarks.

He said:

"Over the years I have been almost alone in challenging the conventional wisdom about the australopithecines alone, that is to say, in conjunction with my colleagues in the school I built up in Birmingham—but I fear to little effect. The voice of higher authority had spoken, and its message in due course became incorporated in text books all over the world."

The situation has not changed since Zuckerman spoke in 1973. The voices of authority in paleoanthropology and the scientific community in general have managed to keep the humanlike view of Australopithecus intact. The extensive and well-documented evidence contradicting this favored view remains confined to the pages of professional journals, where it has little or no influence on the public in general, even the educated public.

Reviewing the decades-long controversy about the nature of Australopithecus, Oxnard wrote in 1984:

"In the uproar, at the time, as to whether or not these creatures were near-ape or human, the opinion that they were human won the day. This may well have resulted not only in the defeat of the contrary opinion but also in the burying of that part of the evidence upon which the contrary opinion was based. If this is so, it should be possible to unearth this other part of the evidence. This evidence may actually be more compatible with the new view; it may help open the possibility that these particular australopithecines are neither like African apes nor humans, and certainly not intermediate, but something markedly different from either."

Of course, this is exactly the point we have been making throughout this book. Evidence has been buried. We ourselves have uncovered considerable amounts of such buried evidence relating to the antiquity of the modern human type.
 

Summarizing his findings, Oxnard stated:

"The various australopithecine fossils are usually quite different from both man and the African apes . . . Viewed as a genus, they are a mosaic of features unique to themselves and features bearing some resemblance to those of the orangutan."

Considering the anatomical uniqueness of the australopithecines, Oxnard said:

"If these estimates are true, then the possibility that any of the australopithecines is a direct part of human ancestry recedes."

Like Louis and Richard Leakey, Oxnard believed that the Homo line was far more ancient than the standard evolutionary scenario allows. In this connection, Oxnard called attention to some of the fossils we have previously discussed, such as the humanlike ER 813 talus, over 1.5 million years old, and the Kanapoi humerus, perhaps 4 or more million years old.

From such evidence, Oxnard concluded that the genus Homo was 5 or more million years old.

"The conventional notion of human evolution," said Oxnard, "must now be heavily modified or even rejected . . . new concepts must be explored."

LUCY IN THE SAND WITH DIATRIBES

Despite Oxnard's work, most scientists still adhere to the doctrine that Australopithecus is a direct human ancestor. One such scientist is Donald Johanson. Donald Johanson studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, under F. Clark Howell.

As a young graduate student, eager to learn the romantic business of hominid fossil hunting, Johanson accompanied Howell to Africa, working at the Omo site in Ethiopia.

Johanson later returned to Africa, this time heading his own expedition to Hadar, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. One afternoon, he found the upper portion of a tibia, a long bone between the knee and the ankle. The bone was obviously from some kind of primate. Nearby, Johanson found a distal femur, the lower end of a thighbone. From the way the femur and tibia fit together, Johanson believed he had found the complete knee joint not of some ancient monkey but of a hominid, an ancestor of modern humans. The deposits yielding the fossils were over 3 million years old, making this one of the oldest hominid finds ever made.

In scientific publications that followed, Johanson reported that the Hadar knee (AL 129) was 4 million years old and belonged to a primitive australopithecine with a fully human bipedal gait.

During the next year's work, Alemayehu Asfaw, an Ethiopian working at the Hadar site with Johanson, found some fossil jaws. Classifying them proved difficult. Johanson asked Richard Leakey to come and have a look at them. Leakey took up the invitation and arrived accompanied by his mother Mary Leakey and wife Meave. Together with Johanson, they examined the jaws and judged them to be Homo, making them the oldest Homo fossils yet found.

On November 30, 1974, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray were searching Locality 162 at the Hadar site, collecting bits of mammalian bone. After some time, Gray was ready to call it quits and go back to the camp. Johanson, however, suggested they check out a nearby gully. Gray and Johanson did not find much.

But as they were about to leave, Johanson spotted a piece of arm bone lying exposed on the surface. As they looked around, they could see scattered on the surface other bones—apparently from the same hominid individual. Johanson and Gray started jumping and howling in the 110-degree heat, celebrating what was obviously an extremely significant find. That evening Johanson and his coworkers partied while a Beatles song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," blared repeatedly from the camp sound system. From the lyrics of that song, the female hominid received her name, Lucy.

By a combination of potassium-argon, fission track, and paleomagnetic dating methods, Johanson determined that Lucy was 3.5 million years old.

In 1975, Johanson was back at Hadar, this time with a National Geographic photographer, who recorded another important discovery. On the side of a hill, Johanson and his team found the fossil remains of 13 hominids, including males, females, and children. The group was called the First Family. They were the same geological age as Lucy, about 3.5 million years old.

With the First Family, the major discoveries at Hadar, which also included the Hadar knee, Alemayehu's jaws, and Lucy, were completed. We shall now examine how these fossils were interpreted and reinterpreted by various parties.

In classifying his finds, Johanson initially relied heavily upon the judgment of Richard and Mary Leakey that the Alemayehu jaws and First Family specimens were Homo. If Lucy and the AL 129 femur and tibia were australopithecine, as Johanson believed, then there were two kinds of hominids at Hadar.

Johanson was later influenced to change his mind about the number of species at Hadar. The person who convinced him to do so was Timothy D. White, a paleontologist who had worked at Lake Turkana with Richard Leakey. White also convinced Johanson that the Hadar hominid represented a new species. Johanson and White called it Australopithecus afarensis, after the Afar region of Ethiopia.

According to Johanson and White, Australopithecus afarensis, the oldest australopithecine ever discovered, gave rise to two lineages. The first led by way of Australopithecus africanus to the robust australopithecines.

The second lineage led by way of Homo habilis to Homo erectus and thence to Homo sapiens.
 

A. AFARENSIS: OVERLY HUMANIZED?

Johanson said that Australopithecus afarensis individuals had "smallish, essentially human bodies." But several scientists have strongly disagreed with Johanson's picture of Australopithecus afarensis. These dissenters have painted a far more apelike portrait of Lucy and her relatives.

In most cases, their views on Lucy parallel the earlier work of Oxnard, Zuckerman, and others on Australopithecus.

The Hadar fossils did not include a complete skull of an A. afarensis individual, but Tim White managed to pull together a partial reconstruction, using cranial fragments, pieces of upper and lower jaw, and some facial bones from several First Family individuals. According to Johanson, the reconstructed skull "looked very much like a small female gorilla." Here there was no dispute between Johanson and his critics. Both agreed that the afarensis head was apelike.

As for the body of A. afarensis, Randall L. Susman, Jack T. Stern, Charles E. Oxnard, and others have found it very apelike, thus challenging Johanson's view that Lucy walked upright on the ground in human fashion. Lucy's shoulder-blade was almost identical to that of an ape. The shoulder joint was turned upward, indicating that Lucy's arms were probably used for climbing in trees and perhaps suspending the body.

The bones of the arm were like those of tree-climbing primates, and the spinal column featured points of attachment for very powerful shoulder and back muscles. The bones of the wrist and palm region of the hand were adapted for powerful grasping, as were the long, curved finger bones. The hip and leg bones were also adapted for climbing, and the foot had curved toes that would be useful in grasping branches of trees.

One can just imagine the effects of a painting or model of Lucy engaged in suspensory or other arboreal behavior. This would surely detract from her image as a creature well on the way to human status. Even if one believes Lucy could have evolved into a human being, one still has to admit that her anatomical features appear to have been misrepresented for propaganda purposes.

Before leaving the topic of Australopithecus afarensis, we note that Richard Leakey, Christine Tardieu, and many others have argued that the fossil material for this species actually included two or even three species.

Within the scientific community there is as yet no unanimous picture of what the australopithecines, including A. afarensis, were really like, both in terms of their morphology and their evolutionary relation with modern humans.

Some see them as ancestors, while others, such as C. E. Oxnard, do not.
 

THE LAETOLI FOOTPRINTS

The Laetoli site is located in northern Tanzania, about 30 miles south of Olduvai Gorge. Laetoli is the Masai word for red lily. In 1979, members of an expedition led by Mary Leakey noticed some marks on the ground. They proved to be fossil footprints of animals. Among them were some that appeared to have been made by hominids. The prints had been impressed in layers of volcanic ash, which yielded a potassium-argon age of 3.6 to 3.8 million years.

National Geographic magazine featured an article by Mary Leakey titled "Footprints in the Ashes of Time." In her analysis of the prints, Leakey cited Louise Robbins, a footprint expert from the University of North Carolina, who said "they looked so human, so modern, to be found in tuffs so old."

Readers who have accompanied us this far in our intellectual journey will have little difficulty in recognizing the Laetoli footprints as potential evidence for the presence of anatomically modern human beings over 3.6 million years ago in Africa.

We were, however, somewhat astonished to encounter such a striking anomaly in the unexpected setting of the more recent annals of standard paleoanthropological research. What amazed us most was that scientists of worldwide reputation, the best in their profession, could look at these footprints, describe their humanlike features, and remain completely oblivious to the possibility that the creatures that made them might have been as humanlike as ourselves.

Their mental currents were running in the usual fixed channels.

Mary Leakey wrote:

"At least 3,600,000 years ago, in Pliocene times, what I believe to be man's direct ancestor walked fully upright with a bipedal, free-striding gait. . . . the form of his foot was exactly the same as ours."

Who was the ancestor? Taking Leakey's point of view, the Laetoli footprints would have been made by a non-australopithecine ancestor of Homo habilis. Taking the Johanson-White point of view, the Laetoli footprints would have been made by Australopithecus afarensis. In either case, the creature who made the prints would have had an apelike head and other primitive features.

But why not a creature with fully modern feet and fully modern body? There is nothing in the footprints that rules this out. Furthermore, we have compiled in this book quite a bit of fossil evidence, some of it from Africa, that is consistent with the presence of anatomically modern human beings in the Early Pleistocene and the Late Pliocene.

Are we perhaps exaggerating the humanlike features of the Laetoli footprints? Let us see what various researchers have said. Louise M. Robbins, who provided an initial evaluation of the Laetoli prints to Mary Leakey in 1979, later published a more detailed report. Several sets of tracks, identified by letters, were found at Laetoli. In examining the "G" trails, representing three individuals described by Mary Leakey as a possible family group, Robbins found that the prints "share many features that are characteristic of the human foot structure."

She especially noted that the big toe pointed straight forward, as in humans, and not out to the side as in the apes. In apes, the big toe can be moved much like the human thumb. Robbins concluded that "the four functional regions—heel, arch, ball, and toes—of the hominids' feet imprinted the ash in a typically human manner" and that "the hominids walked across the ash surface in characteristic human bipedal fashion."

M. H. Day studied the prints using photogrammetric methods. Photogrammetry is the science of obtaining exact measurements through the use of photography. His study showed the prints had "close similarities with the anatomy of the feet of the modern human habitually unshod; arguably the normal human condition."

Typically, Day concluded:

"There is now no serious dispute as to the upright stance and bipedal gait of the australopithecines."

But what proof did he have that an australopithecine made the Laetoli footprints? There is no reason to rule out the possibility that some unknown creature, perhaps very much like modern Homo sapiens, was the cause of them.

R. H. Tuttle, a physical anthropologist, stated:

"The shapes of the prints are indistinguishable from those of striding, habitually barefoot humans."

Tuttle concluded:

"Strictly on the basis of the morphology of the G prints, their makers could be classified as Homo . . . because they are so similar to those of Homo sapiens, but their early date would probably deter many palaeoanthropologists from accepting this assignment. I suspect that if the prints were undated, or if they had been given younger dates, most experts would probably accept them as having been made by Homo." Tuttle also stated: "They are like small barefoot Homo sapiens."

Furthermore, Tuttle held that the A. afarensis foot could not have made the prints. As we have seen, the A. afarensis foot had long, curved toes, and Tuttle said it was hard to imagine them "fitting neatly into the footprints at Laetoli." The same would be true of any australopithecine foot.

Stern and Susman objected to this. Convinced that the apelike A. afarensis foot had made the Laetoli footprints, they proposed that the ancient hominids had walked across the volcanic ash with their long toes curled under their feet, as chimpanzees have sometimes been observed to do. Curled-under toes would explain why the A. afarensis footprints at Laetoli so much resembled those made by the relatively short-toed human foot.

Could an australopithecine walking with curled toes have made the humanlike prints? Tuttle found this extremely unlikely. If the Laetoli hominid had long toes, then, said Tuttle, one would expect to find two patterns of toe impressions—long extended toes and short curled toes, with extra-deep knuckle marks. This was not the case, which meant the long-toed afarensis foot could not have made the prints.

Even Tim White, who believed Australopithecus afarensis made the footprints, stated:

"The Stern and Susman (1983) model of toe curling 'as in the chimpanzee' predicts substantial variation in lateral toe lengths seen on the Laetoli prints. This prediction is not borne out by the fossil prints."

Directly challenging Johanson, White, Latimer, and Lovjoy, who asserted Australopithecus afarensis made the Laetoli prints, Tuttle said:

"Because of digital curvature and elongation and other skeletal features that evidence arboreal habits . . . it is unlikely that Australopithecus afarensis from Hadar, Ethiopia, could make footprints like those at Laetoli."

Such statements have provoked elaborate counterattacks from Johanson and his followers, who have continued to promote the idea that A. afarensis could have made the tracks.

Tim White, for example, published in 1987 a study of the Laetoli prints in which he disputed Tuttle's contention that their maker was a hominid more advanced than A. afarensis.

White asserted:

"There is not a single shred of evidence among the 26 hominid individuals in the collection of over 5,000 vertebrate remains from Laetoli that would suggest the presence of a more advanced Pliocene hominid at this site."

But, as we have seen in our review of African hominid fossils, there are in fact a few "shreds" of evidence for the presence of sapiens-like creatures in the Pliocene, some not far from Laetoli. Also, it is well known that human skeletal remains are quite rare, even at sites where there are other unmistakable signs of a human presence.

White predicted that,

"the Laetoli prints will eventually be shown to be subtly distinct from those left under analogous conditions by anatomically modern humans."

But as far as anyone can see now, they are indistinguishable from those of modern humans. Even White himself once said:

"Make no mistake about it. They are like modern human footprints. If one were left in the sand of a California beach today, and a four-year-old were asked what it was, he would instantly say that somebody had walked there. He wouldn't be able to tell it from a hundred other prints on the beach, nor would you. The external morphology is the same. There is a well-shaped modern heel with a strong arch and a good ball of the foot in front of it. The big toe is in a straight line. It doesn't stick out to the side like an ape toe."

And Tuttle noted:

"in all discernible morphological features, the feet of the individuals that made the G trails are indistinguishable from those of modern humans."
 

BLACK SKULL, BLACK THOUGHTS

In 1985, Alan Walker of Johns Hopkins University discovered west of Lake Turkana a fossil hominid skull stained dark by minerals. Called the Black Skull, it raised questions about Donald Johanson's view of hominid evolution.

According to Johanson's original idea, Australopithecus afarensis gave rise to two lines of hominids. This arrangement can be visualized as a tree with two branches. The trunk is Australopithecus afarensis. On one branch is the Homo line, proceeding from Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. On the second branch are the australopithecines arising from Australopithecus afarensis.

Johanson and White claimed that Australopithecus afarensis gave rise to Australopithecus africanus, which in turn gave rise to Australopithecus robustus. The trend was toward larger teeth and jaws, and a larger skull with a ridge of bone, the saggital crest, running lengthwise along the top. The saggital crest served as a point of attachment for the powerful jaw muscles of robust australopithecines.

Australopithecus robustus then supposedly gave rise to the super-robust Australopithecus boisei, which manifested all the abovementioned features in an extreme form. The Black Skull, designated KNM-WT 17000, was similar to Australopithecus boisei, but was 2.5 million years old—older than the oldest robust australopithecines.

How did Johanson respond to the discovery of the boisei-like Black Skull? He admitted that the Black Skull complicated things, making it impossible to arrange Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, and Australopithecus boisei in a single line of succession coming from Australopithecus afarensis. Johanson proposed four possible arrangements of these species, without suggesting which one was correct. There was, he said, not yet enough evidence to decide among them.

The uncertainty about the number of species at Hadar, combined with the confused relationships among the successor species (Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus, Australopithecus boisei, and Homo habilis), create problems for evolutionists.

Pat Shipman said in 1986:

"The best answer we can give right now is that we no longer have a very clear idea of who gave rise to whom."

In the midst of the new complexity, one question is especially important—the origin of the Homo line. Shipman told of seeing Bill Kimbel, an associate of Johanson, attempt to deal with the phylogenetic implications of the Black Skull.

"At the end of a lecture on Australopithecine evolution, he erased all the tidy, alternative diagrams and stared at the blackboard for a moment. Then he turned to the class and threw up his hands," wrote Shipman.

Kimbel eventually decided the Homo line came from Australopithecus africanus. Johanson and White continued to maintain that Homo came directly from Australopithecus afarensis.

After she considered various phylogenetic alternatives and found the evidence for all of them inconclusive, Shipman stated:

"We could assert that we have no evidence whatsoever of where Homo arises from and remove all members of the genus Australopithecus from the hominid family. . . . I've such a visceral negative reaction to this idea that I suspect I am unable to evaluate it rationally. I was brought up on the notion that Australopithecus is a hominid."

This is one of the more honest statements we have heard from a mainstream scientist involved in paleoanthropological research.

In the foregoing discussion, we have considered only the evidence that is generally accepted today by most scientists. Needless, to say, if we were to also consider the evidence for anatomically modern humans in very ancient times that would complicate the matter even further.

Summary of Anomalous Evidence Related to Human Antiquity

Having reviewed the history of African discoveries related to human evolution, we can make the following summary observations.

(1) There is a significant amount of evidence from Africa suggesting that beings resembling anatomically modern humans were present in the Early Pleistocene and Pliocene.

(2) The conventional image of Australopithecus as a very humanlike terrestrial biped appears to be false.

(3) The status of Australopithecus and Homo erectus as human ancestors is questionable.

(4) The status of Homo habilis as a distinct species is questionable.

(5) Even confining ourselves to conventionally accepted evidence, the multiplicity of proposed evolutionary linkages among the hominids in Africa presents a very confusing picture.

Combining these findings with those from the preceding chapters, we conclude that the total evidence, including fossil bones and artifacts, is most consistent with the view that anatomically modern humans have coexisted with other primates for tens of millions of years.

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