Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Louis Leakey also had some iconoclastic opinions about the relationships among the various australopithecines. “Textbook views that . . . the robust Australopithecus is . . . a late specialized variant of the so-called gracile one . . . cannot any longer be regarded as valid,” wrote Leakey (1971, p. 27). “A number of examples of the robust Australopithecines have now been found in deposits much older than Olduvai, while side by side with them are specimens that apparently represent ancestors of Homo habilis.” Leakey here seems to be referring to discoveries by his son Richard at sites near Lake Turkana, Kenya. As we shall see (Section 11.6), the dating of these Lake Turkana deposits was controversial. Richard Leakey originally favored an age of 2.9 million years, but he eventually agreed with critics that the deposits were about 2 million years old. Even so, the robust australopithecines fossils from Lake Turkana would be as old as the gracile australopithecine fossils found in South Africa. The elder Leakey therefore thought he had good reason to challenge the widely accepted belief that the robust australopithecines were derived from the gracile ones. Leakey’s proposal was given additional support in 1986, with the discovery of the so-called Black Skull (Section 11.11), which pushed the robust australopithecines back to 2.5 million years ago. Mary Leakey, as we have seen, outdid her husband in boldness—she suggested the robust and gracile australopithecines might be the males and females of the same species.

As for Java man and Peking man, representing Homo erectus, Leakey (1960d, p. 186) also considered them “nothing but various aberrant and over-specialized branches that broke away at different times from the main stock leading to Homo.” Leakey was not alone in his views about Homo erectus. In 1972, J. B. Birdsell, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote: “It is very difficult to visualize how any of the known forms of Homo erectus could have evolved into the grade of Homo sapiens. . . . nowhere can it be demonstrated that men of the Homo erectus grade did evolve into modern populations” (Goodman 1983, p. 121). Of course, there are many who would disagree with Leakey and Birdsell.

Some authorities have placed much emphasis on fossils such as Rhodesia man in Africa, Solo man in Java, and the European Neanderthals. These, they say, show clearly an evolutionary transition between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. But Leakey (1971, p. 27) 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.

So whereas some scientists would have Homo erectus evolving into the Neanderthals, who then give rise to modern Homo sapiens, Leakey would have all three coexisting. And as we have seen (Section 9.2.9), there is substantial evidence from the Chinese Middle Pleistocene that Homo erectus coexisted with varieties of Homo sapiens, including Neanderthals. In fact, there is evidence that erectus-like creatures may exist today in isolated wilderness regions, including China (Chapter 10). There are even reports that they have interbred with humans (Section 10.8). All of this agrees with our proposal that various humanlike and apelike creatures have coexisted in the distant past, just as at present.

11.4.4 Evidence for Bone smashing in the Middle Miocene