Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

Concerning the new OH 62 discovery, Wood pointed out that this hominid individual had been classified as Homo habilis by Johanson and his coworkers primarily because its craniodental remains resembled those of the habilis-like Stw 53 skull from the Sterkfontein site in South Africa. But Wood (1987, p. 188) observed: “The logical ‘trail’ becomes tenuous because Stw 53 has merely been likened to H. habilis, and not formally attributed to it, even though more than a decade has elapsed since its discovery.” Wood appeared to suggest, though somewhat indirectly, that OH 62 might in fact be attributed to Australopithecus africanus, which he said was “the most likely alternative taxonomic attribution for Stw 53” ( 1987, p. 188).

According to Wood (1987, p. 187), one interpretation of the OH 62 find is that it “confirms that the range of variation within material from the early Pleistocene of East Africa assigned to early Homo is now too great to be sensibly encompassed within one taxon.” Wood himself favored this view.

So in the end, we find that Homo habilis is about as substantial as a desert mirage, appearing now humanlike, now apelike, now real, now unreal, according to the tendency of the viewer. Taking the many conflicting views into consideration, we find it most likely that the Homo habilis material belongs to more than one species, including a small, apelike, arboreal australopithecine (OH 62 and some of the Olduvai specimens), an early species of Homo ( ER 1470 skull), and anatomically modern humans (ER 1481 and ER 1472 femurs).

11.8 Oxnard’s Critique of Australopithecus

According to most paleoanthropologists, Australopithecus was a direct human ancestor, with a very humanlike postcranial anatomy. Advocates of this view have also asserted that Australopithecus walked erect, in a manner practically identical to modern human beings. But right from the very start, some researchers objected to this depiction of Australopithecus. Influential English scientists, including Sir Arthur Keith (1931), said that the Australopithecus was not a hominid but a variety of ape (Sections 11.3.1–3).

This negative view persisted until the early 1950s, when the combined effect of further Australopithecus finds and the fall of Piltdown man created a niche in mainstream paleoanthropological thought for a humanlike Australopithecus.

But even after Australopithecus won mainstream acceptance as a hominid and direct human ancestor, opposition continued. Louis Leakey (1960d, 1971) held that Australopithecus was an early and very apelike offshoot from the main line of human evolution (Section 11.4.3). Later, his son Richard Leakey (1973b) took much the same stance (Section 11.6.2).

In the early 1950s, Sir Solly Zuckerman (1954) published extensive biometric studies showing Australopithecus was not as humanlike as imagined by those who favored putting this creature in the lineage of Homo sapiens. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Charles E. Oxnard of the University of Chicago, employing multivariate statistical analysis, renewed and amplified the line of attack begun by Zuckerman.

In this section, we shall focus on Oxnard’s studies of Australopithecus, except those dealing specifically with Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy). The latter are included in our general discussion of Australopithecus afarensis (Section 11.9).

11.8.1 A Different Picture of Australopithecus

In Uniqueness and Diversity in Human Evolution, Oxnard (1975a, p. vii) wrote: “Whereas the conventional wisdom about human evolution depends upon the (apparent) marked similarity between modern man and the various australopithecine fossils, the studies here indicate that these fossils are uniquely different from modern man in many respects.”

Oxnard’s interpretation of the fossil evidence profoundly unsettles the evolutionary status of Australopithecus. According to Oxnard (1975b, p. 394), “it is rather unlikely that any of the Australopithecines . . . can have any direct phylogenetic link with the genus Homo.”

In Table 11.5, we review the observations that led Oxnard to this conclusion. The table also includes material from Zuckerman’s studies.