Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

20 years. They did not report any mixture of Bed III materials or chips of limestonelike 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.

In short, we are faced with contradictory testimony. 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.

Reck had studied the matrix at the site. And both Reck and Leakey had studied the matrix directly in contact with the skeleton in Munich. Did they fail to see the red pebbles and chips of limestone, or make false statements about their absence in the matrix? Neither possibility seems likely.

Later, Boswell and other scientists in England studied a sample sent from Munich, in isolation from any of the bones. Mollison, we have already noted, had for years expressed his own view that the skeleton was a recent burial. His statement assuring Boswell that the sample was part “of the material in which the Oldoway skeleton had been embedded” is thus open to question.

Cooper and Watson (1932b) had pointed out in one of their letters to Nature: “The photographs published by Prof. Reck show that the whole of the upper and a good deal of the lateral surfaces of the skeleton were exposed during the excavation made for its removal. . . . It need scarcely be pointed out that the only material certainly of the grave infilling carried to Munich in this way is that which is contained within the ribs and between the limbs and the trunk.” Did Mollison carefully take his sample from within the ribs or between the legs of Reck’s skeleton? Or did he take it from matrix materials that may have come from elsewhere on the block of sediment that contained the skeleton? None of the reports we have seen give any information that would allow these questions to be answered.

Even if the matrix sample supplied by Mollison was suitable for analysis, the presence of limestone chips (containing amphibole) is of ambiguous significance. E. J. Wayland (1932), head of the Geological Survey of Uganda, wrote in a letter to Nature: “The fact that the matrix . . . contained bits of concretionary limestone containing a mineral characteristic of Bed 4 does not prove the burial to be post-Bed 5, for Bed 4 contains concretionary limestone, and for that matter so do the other beds, not excluding Bed 2.”

It seems that Boswell’s mineral test, if accepted at face value, most strongly supports a Bed IV burial. During such a burial, Bed IV limestone chips and bright red Bed III pebbles could have been mixed into Bed II sediments. But a Bed IV burial would still give the anatomically modern skeleton an unexpectedly great age (Table 11.1, p. 629) of 400,000 to 700,000 years.

Keep in mind, however, that Reck, who examined the skeleton in situ, saw no signs of limestone chips or bright red pebbles, although he looked carefully for them. This suggests that no burial activity disturbed any layers of limestonelike calcrete in Beds II, III, IV, or V.

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” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, p. 397). This adds to our suspicion that the matrix sample supplied by Mollison to Boswell may not have been representative of the material closely surrounding Reck’s skeleton.

Reck and Leakey, however, 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” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, p. 397).