Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

It is intriguing that the views of scientists like Tardieu, Stern, and Susman, though appearing in scientific journals, are rarely encountered in popular presentations or general textbooks. This points to the existence of a pattern of knowledge filtration in the scientific community that tends, consciously or unconsciously, to suppress information that would complicate the relatively simple picture of human evolution presented to the public in general and to students at all levels of the educational system, except, perhaps, graduate students working directly in the field of physical anthropology.

Be that as it may, Johanson’s lucky find saved the day for him, sparing him the embarrassment of leaving Ethiopia fundless and fossilless. Johanson said of the Hadar knee find: “It had brought me up a step; in my dealings with other scientists I was standing taller. I now had a unique hominid fossil of my own” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 165).

The glamor factor won Johanson 25,000 dollars from supporters in Cleveland, where Johanson held a post at the Museum of Natural History. The new funds allowed Johanson to return for a second year of work at Hadar.

11.9.2 Alemayehu’s jaws

Alemayehu Asfaw was an employee of the Ethiopian Ministry of Culture, and by the terms of Johanson’s agreement with the Ethiopian government, he was working at the Hadar site. In October of 1974, Alemayehu found a fossil jaw that he thought belonged to a baboon, but Johanson said it was hominid. Other similar jaws soon turned up. Classifying them proved difficult. Johanson asked Richard Leakey to come and have a look at them. Leakey took up the invitation, and arrived accompanied by his mother Mary Leakey and wife Meave. Together with Johanson they examined the jaws and judged them to be Homo, making them the oldest Homo fossils yet found (Johanson and Edey 1981, pp. 172–176).

11.9.3 Lucy

On November 30, 1974, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray were searching Locality 162 at the Hadar site, collecting bits of mammalian bone. After some time, Gray was ready to call it quits and go back to the camp. Johanson, however, suggested they check out a nearby gully. Other members of the expedition had already thoroughly searched it, but Johanson, who had been feeling “lucky” all day, decided to have one more look. Gray and Johanson did not find much. But as they were about to leave, Johanson spotted a piece of arm bone lying exposed on the surface. He thought it was hominid. Gray disagreed, saying it was probably from a monkey. Then Gray found a piece of skull and a part of a femur. They seemed definitely hominid. As they looked around, they could see scattered on the surface other bones—apparently from the same hominid individual. Johanson and Gray started jumping and howling in the 110-degree heat, celebrating what was obviously an extremely significant find. Finally they calmed down, realizing their boots were probably smashing some of the precious bones. After collecting a few hominid fossils, they headed back to camp. That evening Johanson and his coworkers partied while a Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” blared repeatedly from the camp sound system. From the lyrics of that song, the female hominid received her name, Lucy (Johanson and Edey 1981, pp. 16–18).

By a combination of potassium-argon, fission track, and paleomagnetic dating methods, Johanson determined that Lucy was 3.5 million years old (Johanson and Edey 1981, pp. 200–203).

11.9.4 The First Family

In 1975, Johanson was back at Hadar, this time with a National Geographic photographer, who recorded another important discovery. On the side of a hill, Johanson and his team found the fossil remains of 13 hominids, including males, females, and children. The group was called the First Family. They were the same geological age as Lucy, about 3.5 million years old.

Stone tools were also found at the First Family site. They were made of basalt, and Johanson said they were “of somewhat better workmanship” than tools from the lower levels of Olduvai Gorge (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 231).

How old were the tools? The fact that they were found on the surface made dating them somewhat difficult. In his book Lucy, Johanson reported the views of John Harris, a tool expert, who had worked at Lake Turkana: “He said that it was really impossible to date a surface-found tool at Lake Turkana because modern humans who needed rough blades to chop animals were making similar implements in profusion as recently as a thousand years ago, and that there were even a few people who were making them there today” (Johanson and Edey

1981, pp. 229–230). In Harris’s opinion, the surface-found tools at Hadar could also have been recent.