Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

“There were all these wonderful renderings in popular magazines and books of little bands of bushmanlike people sitting around with daddy off hunting and momma gathering plant foods and grandma teaching the baby. But that was just a projection of modern man onto ancient man,” declared Binford in an interview (A. Fisher 1988a, p. 37). “We have had far too much of what I tend to think of as the National Geographic approach to research,” said Binford (1981, p. 297).

Binford’s revised view of the cultural evidence at Homo habilis sites, together with the revised view of Homo habilis anatomy, raises many questions about how humanlike Homo habilis really was.

Finally, we should remember that Homo habilis is not the only creature that could have been responsible for the stone tools found at sites yielding Homo habilis fossils. The same is true of the circle of stones found at Olduvai site DK, interpreted by some as part of a shelter. Mary Leakey said that living African tribal people make and use the same kinds of tools and erect the same kinds of shelters (Section 3.7.3). This suggests that beings like modern Homo sapiens, rather than Homo habilis, could have made both the tools and the shelter about 1.5 million to 2.0 million years ago in the Early Pleistocene.

11.7.5 Does Homo Habilis Deserve To Exist?

In light of the contradictory evidence connected with Homo habilis, some researchers have proposed that there was no justification for “creating” this species in the first place.

Doubts about the taxonomic reality of Homo habilis arose right from the start. Even Tobias and Napier, who had joined Louis Leakey in proposing the new species in April of 1964, expressed caution. Tobias and Napier wrote in a letter to the Times of London on June 5, 1964 that “anatomy alone could not tell us whether the creature was a very advanced australopithecine or the lowliest hominine” (Cole 1975, p. 256). In making this statement, Tobias and Napier presumably meant that stone tools and broken animal bones associated with the creature’s ambiguous skeletal remains justified designating it the earliest representative of the genus Homo.

The dental evidence was a cause of concern among some researchers, including T. J. Robinson. Johanson wrote: “He said that one could find greater shape differences in a population of modern humans than Leakey had found between habilis and the australopithecines— or, in fact, between habilis and Homo erectus. Robinson’s point was that on dental evidence alone there was too narrow a slot between Australopithecus and Homo erectus to yield room for another species” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 102). As we have seen, however, there are, aside from the teeth, significant differences between Homo habilis, as represented by the small OH 62 individual, and Homo erectus.

Wilfred Le Gros Clark said: “‘Homo habilis’ has received a good deal of publicity since his sudden appearance was announced, and it is particularly unfortunate that he should have been announced before a full and detailed study of all the relevant fossils can be complete. . . . From the brief accounts that have been published, one is led to hope that he will disappear as rapidly as he came” ( Fix 1984, p. 143). Le Gros Clark consistently maintained his early opposition to Homo habilis.

And C. Loring Brace wrote: “Homo habilis is an empty taxon inadequately proposed and should be formally sunk” (Fix 1984, p. 143).

If the bones attributed by some workers to Homo habilis were not to be interpreted as a new species, then what did they represent? T. J. Robinson argued that Homo habilis had been mistakenly derived from a mixture of skeletal elements belonging to Australopithecus africanus and Homo erectus. Even Louis Leakey suggested that Homo habilis might actually have embraced two Homo species, one giving rise to Homo sapiens and the other to Homo erectus ( Wood 1987, p. 187).