Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

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. At the time Reck had discovered his skeleton, many scientists were still somewhat uncertain about the evolutionary status of Dubois’s Middle Pleistocene Java man. This left some room for controversial discoveries such as Reck’s. But by the 1930s, after Black’s discovery of Beijing 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. In his discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, he believed he had indisputable evidence for the presence of 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. In the issue of Nature (March 25, 1933) immediately following the one carrying Leakey’s reversal on Reck’s skeleton (March 18, 1933), there appeared the following notice in Nature’s “News and Views” section: “On March 18–19 a conference summoned by the Royal Anthropological Institute met at St. John’s College, Cambridge, under the presidency of Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, to receive reports on the human skeletal remains discovered by Dr. Leakey’s archaeological expedition to East Africa in the autumn of last year.” We shall discuss the conference report later in this chapter (Section 11.2.3). For now, we simply note that Leakey’s statement abandoning his previous position on the antiquity of Reck’s skeleton appeared in Nature on the same day as the opening of a conference that would bear heavily on his reputation as a scientist.

In the March 18 issue of Nature, C. Stanton Hicks, of the University of Adelaide, Australia, complained about the disadvantages of practicing science in the outlying regions of the British Empire: “The old-established scientific societies with all their tradition and prestige, their facilities for publication and criticism of original work, and their influence in paving the way to higher posts, are in Great Britain.” Leakey was a colonial, born and raised in British East Africa. In the conference convened to review his discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, this promising young scientist’s fate hung in the balance. He would perhaps be accepted into the elite circles of British science, and given a post at Cambridge, or perhaps be banished into obscurity, lucky to occupy a professorship in an outlying university. It is quite possible Leakey thought it best to withdraw his reputation from somebody else’s controversial fossil and thus pave the way for acceptance of his own better-dated finds at Kanam and Kanjera. After all, some of the most vocal opponents of Reck’s skeleton, such as Boswell, Solomon, Cooper, Watson, and Mollison, would be sitting on the committee that would review the Kanam jaw and Kanjera skulls. As we shall see, the committee accepted the Kanam and Kanjera finds.

In his memoirs, Louis Leakey (1972, pp. 37–38) gave a brief and somewhat confusing review of his involvement with Reck’s skeleton. He said the debate about the skeleton’s age was resolved by a mineral analysis conducted by Boswell after a 1935 visit to Olduvai Gorge. This version is repeated, almost verbatim, in Cole’s 1975 biography of Leakey. But, as far as we can tell, Boswell’s mineral analysis was performed in 1933, and the results were reported in the March 18, 1933 letter to Nature, signed by Boswell, Leakey, Reck, Hopwood, and Solomon.

According to the new view outlined in the March 1933 letter, intact Beds III and IV at Olduvai Gorge were stripped away by erosion at the location of the skeleton. Bed II, thus exposed, would have probably still been covered by some remnants of Bed III and perhaps a thin layer of calcrete, or steppe-lime. The burial supposedly took place at this time. Subsequent to the burial, the layers of Bed V, including thick, hard layers of calcrete, were deposited. The authors of the March 1933 letter said: “it seems certain that the skeleton was deposited where it was found before the main mass of Bed V, and the overlying steppe-lime were formed, that is, the skeleton appears to have been buried at the time of the existence of the old land surface connected with the steppe-lime at the base of Bed V” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, pp. 397–398).