Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

According to Leakey, the fossil-bearing beds at Kanjera were equivalent to Bed IV at Olduvai Gorge. The faunal studies of H. B. S. Cooke (1963) confirmed this, which means the Kanjera beds range from 400,000 to 700,000 years old (Table 11.1, p. 629). But the morphology of the Kanjera skull pieces was quite modern. Leakey (1960d, p. 203) wrote: “The front part of the skull is preserved, in a damaged condition, in two of the specimens, and from this we can see that there was no trace of a bony brow-ridge above the eyes. Instead we find a very small and simple form much as in a child, but certainly of Homo sapiens type.” Scientists now think modern Homo sapiens appeared about 100,000 years ago in Africa. An age of 400,000 years for the Kanjera skulls would, however, be acceptable for the oldest African early Homo sapiens (Bräuer 1984, p. 394). But the author of a recent survey attributed the Kanjera skulls to Homo sapiens cf. sapiens (Groves 1989, p. 291), indicating they are anatomically modern.

11.2.2 Discovery of the kanam jaw

At Kanam, Leakey initially found teeth of Mastodon and a single tooth of Deinotherium (an extinct elephantlike mammal), as well as some crude stone implements. Because Deinotherium was the marker fossil for Bed I at Olduvai Gorge, Leakey believed the Kanam formations were of the same Early Pleistocene age—about 1.7–2.0 million years old, according to current estimates (Oakley et al. 1977, pp. 166, 169).

On March 29, 1932, Leakey’s collector, Juma Gitau, brought him a second 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. Together they searched for more human fossils, but none turned up (L. Leakey 1960d, p. 202).

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 (Cole 1975, p. 91). According to Cooke (1963), the Kanam fauna is older than that of Bed I at Olduvai Gorge, making the Kanam beds at least 2.0 million years old.

Almost without exception, today’s scientists believe that the human lineage extends from Australopithecus in the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, to Homo erectus in the Early and Middle Pleistocene, and thence to Homo sapiens sapiens in the Late Pleistocene. Against this background, a Homo sapiens jaw in the earliest Pleistocene seems strangely out of place. But in the early 1930s, the now dominant view of human origins, although held by some, was still a somewhat tentative hypothesis. A good many British scientists regarded Australopithecus, discovered in 1925 by Raymond Dart in South Africa, as a variety of ape, with no direct connection to the line of human descent. Similarly, many scientists never accepted Java man, and Beijing man had only newly arrived on the scene. Although some scientists did believe Java man and Beijing man, now classified as Homo erectus, were genuine human ancestors, the picture was somewhat clouded by Piltdown man. Whereas Java man and Beijing man had humanlike jaws and apelike skulls, Piltdown man, roughly the same age, featured an apelike jaw and humanlike skull. The Neanderthals also had to be fit into the picture. Some thought they were direct human ancestors, others thought they were on an evolutionary side branch. In short, scientists of the 1930s held varying views about the progress of human evolution and the antiquity of the modern human type. Therefore, not all of them would automatically reject finds such as Leakey made at Kanam and Kanjera.

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.

11.2.3 A commission of scientists Decides on kanam and kanjera