Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Richard Leakey differed from his father by keeping Homo erectus in the direct line of human ancestry, “Most people would now agree that ‘1470’ should be called Homo habilis and that it is a direct ancestor of Homo erectus,” he wrote ( R. Leakey 1984, p. 154).

But the transition from ER 1470 to Homo erectus troubled Birdsell (1975), who wrote: “Anatomically in some ways such an evolutionary stage would seem retrogressive, for in a real sense it postulates that more archaic forms of men evolved out of a surprisingly advanced form, ER-1470” (Fix 1984, p. 137). Birdsell’s statement is of interest because the progression from Homo habilis to Homo erectus is one of the cardinal doctrines of recent evolutionary thought. If this progression turns out to be improbable, that would present severe problems for the conventional account of human evolution. The progression is arguably improbable because it involves, for example, going from skull ER 1470, with moderate brow ridges, to Homo erectus, with massive barlike brow ridges, back to Homo sapiens, with small brow ridges.

Such difficulties did not, however, trouble Richard Leakey. Recently, he said he considers Homo habilis and Homo erectus to be nothing more than early stages of one species—Homo sapiens (Willis 1989, pp. 154–155).

Richard Leakey has made other interesting statements about human beginnings. For instance, he wrote in his book Origins: “If we are honest we have to admit we will never fully know what happened to our ancestors in their journey towards modern humanity: the evidence is simply too sparse” (R. Leakey and Lewin 1977, pp. 11–12).

And in People of the Lake (R. Leakey and Lewin 1978, p. 17), Leakey said: “If someone went to the trouble of collecting together in one room all the fossil remains so far discovered of our ancestors (and their biological relatives) who lived, say, between five and one million years ago, he would need only a couple of large trestle tables on which to spread them out. . . . Yet with a confidence that may strike the uninitiated as something close to supernatural—if not to plain madness—prehistorians can now construct a view of human origins that is anything but crude, and may even bear some resemblance to the truth.” The evidence on the trestle tables would not, of course, be complete. Much has been suppressed or forgotten, and if it were placed back on the tables, it would be harder for confident prehistorians to construct plausible evolutionary lineages.

11.6.3 Humanlike Femurs From Koobi Fora

Some distance from where the ER 1470 skull had been found, but at the same level, John Harris, a paleontologist from the Kenya National Museum, discovered a quite humanlike upper leg bone. Harris summoned Richard Leakey (1973b, pp. 823, 828), who later reported: “Amid a mass of shattered elephant bone lay both ends of the femur of a remarkably advanced hominid. Further search turned up the missing pieces, parts of the tibia and a fragment of the fibula.

. . . John also discovered another femur. All these leg bones lay in deposits older than 2.6 million years. Do they belong to our new-found ‘1470 man?’ Frustratingly, we cannot be sure. It is quite clear, however, that these femurs are unlike those of Australopithecus, and astonishingly similar to those of modern man.” The femurs would later be attributed to Homo habilis.

The first femur, with associated fragments of tibia and fibula, was designated ER 1481 and the other ER 1472. An additional fragment of femur was designated ER 1475. Like the ER 1470 skull, the femurs were found on the surface. But Richard Leakey (1973a, p. 448) wrote in Nature: “The unrolled condition of the specimens and the nature of the sites rules out the possibility of secondary deposition—there is no doubt in the minds of the geologists that the provenance is as reported. All the specimens are heavily mineralized and the adhering matrix is similar to the matrix seen on other fossils from the same sites.” In other words, Leakey was certain the bones had recently weathered out of the fossil-bearing deposits from below the KBS Tuff.

Leakey (1973a, p. 450) stated in a scientific journal that these leg bones “cannot be readily distinguished from H. sapiens if one considers the range of variation known for this species.” In a National Geographic article, Leakey (1973b, p. 821) repeated this view, saying the leg bones were “almost indistinguishable from those of Homo sapiens.”