Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

To remove their doubts about the age of the stone tools found on the surface at the First Family site, Harris and Johanson conducted some excavations and were rewarded by discovering a number of tools in situ. They judged the level at which they were found to be 2.5 million years old (Johanson and Edey along with these tools. Because Australopithecus was not known to have manufactured stone tools, Johanson speculated that Homo habilis was the toolmaker. But the oldest Homo habilis fossils were only about 2 million years old. Johanson simply proposed that habilis remains of the same age as the tools would eventually be found. As we have seen, there are, however, fossil remains resembling the modern human type from Early Pleistocene and Pliocene contexts in Africa (Sections 11.1, 11.2, 11.5, 11.6.3, and 11.6.4) and elsewhere (Section 6.2). It is thus possible that anatomically modern

humans could have made the Hadar tools.

With the First Family, the major discoveries at Hadar, which also included the Hadar knee, Alemayehu’s jaws, and Lucy, were completed. We shall now examine how these fossils were interpreted and reinterpreted by various parties.

11.9.5 Two Hominids at Hadar?

In classifying his finds, Johanson initially relied heavily upon the judgement of Richard and Mary Leakey that the Alemayehu jaws and First Family specimens were Homo (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 217). If Lucy and the AL 129 femur and tibia were australopithecine, as Johanson believed, then there were two kinds of hominids at Hadar.

In a December 1976 National Geographic article, Johanson made a clear distinction between the First Family, which he thought represented Homo, and Lucy, which he thought represented an early Australopithecus (Fix 1984, p. 70). This two-species view was reflected in a number of scientific papers published by Johanson and various coauthors.

Richard Leakey later said that Lucy, with her V-shaped jaw and other primitive features represented “a late Ramapithecus” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 279). Ramapithecus, as previously noted (Section 3.9), was an extremely primitive apelike creature living in the Miocene and Pliocene. It may be recalled that Ramapithecus, originally considered the root of the hominid line, was later reclassified as nonhominid and ancestral to the orangutans.

Given the orangutan affinities of Australopithecus, as detailed by Oxnard (Section 11.8.5), maybe Leakey’s idea that Lucy was a ramapithecine was right.

11.9.6 Johanson and White Decide On a Single Hadar Species

Johanson was later influenced to change his mind about the number of species at Hadar. The person who convinced him to do so was Timothy D. White, a paleontologist who had worked at Lake Turkana with Richard Leakey. White, on faunal grounds, disputed Leakey’s dating of the KBS tuff (Section 11.6.5.2). Eventually, he left Lake Turkana and for a time worked at Laetoli, Kenya, where Mary Leakey had found hominid jaws similar to those at Hadar.

Johanson and White first met briefly in Africa. In the summer of 1977, when Johanson was back at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History studying his Hadar fossils, he asked White to bring samples of the Laetoli fossils.

White came and convinced Johanson to accept the following points: (1) the U-shaped jaws discovered at Hadar by Johanson and those discovered at Laetoli by Mary Leakey were of the same species; (2) the species was not Homo, as Johanson and the Leakeys had originally thought, but a new kind of australopithecine; (3) the V-shaped jaw of Lucy was also of the same species, being a female sexual variant of the other U-shaped jaws. Referring to a scientific paper in which he had advocated the two-species concept, Johanson said: “I would withdraw that paper today if I could” (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 209).

Johanson and White (1979) soon announced their new species, calling it Australopithecus afarensis, after the Afar region of Ethiopia where most of the specimens were found.