Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

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 neither Australopithecus nor Homo erectus were in the direct line of human ancestry (Figure 11.7). He later wrote: “For too long scientists have been confused by earlier theories and in particular by those which derived Homo sapiens from classical forms of Neanderthal man, which in turn was supposed to have been derived from Homo erectus, that in turn was said to have been originated in the Australopithecines. . . . Today the vast amount of evidence that has been accumulated shows us clearly that the stock which was leading to ourselves—as distinct from Homo erectus—was already present some 2 million years ago in East Africa and that, at that time, it was contemporary with Australopithecus. We should therefore expect to find evidence that true Homo, as well as primitive Australopithecus, was already present during the late stages of the Pliocene, about 4 million years ago” (L. Leakey 1971, p. 25).

Figure 11.7. According to Louis Leakey (1960d, pp. 210 – 211; 1971, p. 27), neither Australopithecus nor Homo erectus was ancestral to modern humans. The Neanderthals, said Leakey (1971, p. 27), were probably the result of crossbreeding between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. Today, the details of human evolution remain a subject of active debate. But most paleoanthropologists favor a progression from one of the australopithecines to Homo habilis, Homo erectus, early Homo sapiens, and then the Neanderthals and modern humans.

Although Leakey was now willing to settle for somewhat primitive Homo habilis as the representative of true humanity in the Early Pleistocene, he had earlier believed that the fully modern human type extended that far back in geological time. As we have seen Leakey initially supported Reck’s anatomically modern skeleton, found in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge (Section 11.1). He also campaigned on behalf of his own finds of sapiens-like human fossils at Kanam and Kanjera (Section 11.2). These finds, all of which Leakey originally thought to be from the Middle and Early Pleistocene, would have been the contemporaries of Australopithecus and Homo erectus. Later, Leakey withdrew his support of a Middle Pleistocene date for Reck’s skeleton when challenged by Boswell, and soon thereafter saw his own finds at Kanam and Kanjera discredited in the eyes of most scientists by the same persistent critic. But in reviewing the controversies over these fossils, we have found, despite some ambiguity, sufficient reason to keep them as evidence for sapiens-like beings in Africa 1–2 million years ago.