From Atlantis to the Sphinx

by Colin Wilson

  By that time, another palaeontologist, G. von Koenigswald, had made a careful study of the Trinil strata, and proved that Dubois’s ape-man dated from the mid-Pleistocene, and was about 300,000 years old. Eventually, enough bone fragments and stone tools were found to leave no doubt that Java man was undoubtedly a human being. But was he the ancestor of modern man?

  A new rival was about to appear on the scene.

  In 1911, a butterfly collector named Kattwinkel was pursuing a specimen with his net when he glanced down and saw that he was about to stumble over the edge of a steep cliff. The Olduvai Gorge, in what was then German East Africa (and is now Tanzania) is virtually invisible until you are about to fall into it. Kattwinkel climbed down the 300-foot slope, and found that the gorge had an abundance of rocks containing fossils. He pushed a few of these into his collecting bag, and took them back to Berlin. When a so-far unknown three-toed horse was found among them, a geologist named Professor Hans Reck was asked to go and study the gorge.

  He soon made some important finds—bones of prehistoric hippos, elephants and antelopes. Then one of his native assistants saw a piece of bone sticking out of the earth. After scraping away the surface, he found himself peering at what looked like an ape skull, embedded in the rock. It had to be chipped out with hammers and chisels, and proved to be a human being, not an ape. Reck identified the strata in which it had been found as about 800,000 years old.

  Could it have been a more recent burial? Reck finally decided against it. If a grave is filled in—even a hundred thousand years ago—a good geologist can tell.

  So it looked as if Reck had proved that human beings not unlike modern man, lived in Africa nearly a million years ago. While it would not be true to say that it flew in the face of all Darwinian teaching—for there was nothing in Darwin that said man had evolved from ape in the past two million years—it certainly contradicted the assumption that had been made ever since Darwin announced the Missing Link, and that seemed to be verified by the discovery of Cro-Magnon man.

  Back in Berlin, Reck announced his discovery, and was startled at the hostility he aroused. As usual, the experts simply refused to admit that this might be an ancient human ancestor. It was simply not apelike enough. In effect, Reck was attacking the theory of evolution. The skeleton had to be younger—perhaps a mere five thousand years.

  The First World War caused the controversy to be forgotten. But not in Africa. Dr Louis Leakey, an anthropologist who was a fellow of St John’s in Cambridge, went to Berlin in 1925 (when he was 23), met Reck, and saw the skeleton. He also was inclined to date it as recent. But in 1931, he and Reck went to the site with other geologists, and carefully studied the strata. And when he saw some stone implements that had been discovered in the same layer—and even in the bed below—he came around to Reck’s opinion.

  In a sense, this was almost as heretical as Alfred Russel Wallace’s view that modern humans existed in the Tertiary. Now Leakey announced that Dubois’s Java man could not be a human ancestor—and neither could another recent discovery, an ape-like skeleton found at Chou-kou-tien in China in 1929, and labelled Peking Man. If a fully developed creature had been around at the same time, then Reck’s skeleton was more likely to be the ancestor of modern man.

  The experts attacked. It was simply unlikely, said two British palaeontologists called Cooper and Watson, that a complete skeleton could be that old. And the filing of the teeth made it sound like modern Africans...

  By now, Leakey had made two more discoveries, at Kanam and Kanjera, near Lake Victoria—a jaw and molar in Kanam and three skulls in Kanjera. And again, they seemed to be from fully human beings—Homo sapiens. The Kanjera beds ranged from 400,000 to 700,000 years old. In other words, Leakey had discovered a Cro-Magnon that was at least four times as old as it should be. He regarded this as additional support for his view that Reck’s skeleton was truly human.

  But at this point there was another intervention. A Professor T. Mollison, who was on record as thinking that Reck’s skeleton was a modern Masai tribesman, now went to Berlin, obtained some of the material that had surrounded the skeleton when it was found, and sent it to be examined by a geologist named Percy Boswell. Boswell has been described by Leakey’s biographer as ‘contradictory... emotional’ and with ‘the proverbial chip on his shoulder’. Boswell studied it, and published in Nature a report claiming that he had found bright red pebbles like those in bed 3 (above the bed where the skeleton was found), and chips of limestone like those of bed 5, far above bed 2. It seemed odd that neither Reck nor Leakey had noticed this. And yet instead of pointing this out, they both gave way, and conceded that they had probably been wrong. The skeleton, they agreed, had probably got down into bed 2 as a result of a burial—a possibility Reck had ruled out at the very beginning—or possibly an earthquake.

  But in March 1933, a commission of 28 scientists studied the Kanjera skulls and the Kanam jaw, and concluded that the jaw was early Pleistocene (possibly more than a million years old) and that the skulls were middle Pleistocene (possibly half a million years old).

  Once again Percy Boswell entered the fray. His doubts led Leakey to invite him to Africa. But he failed to prove his point. He had marked the sites of the finds with iron pegs, but it seemed that locals had stolen them for spearheads or fish hooks. He had photographed the sites, but his camera had malfunctioned. He had borrowed a photograph taken by a friend of his wife’s, but this proved to be of another canyon. And he had not been able to mark them exactly on a map, because no maps of sufficient detail existed. Boswell reacted unfavourably to these signs of sloppiness, and his report was damning. In effect, he simply refused to believe Leakey.

  Following Boswell’s report, Leakey protested that he had shown Boswell the precise site of one of the skulls, and proved it by picking up a small piece of bone that fitted skull number 3. As to the jaw, it had been found in association with a site with mastodon and Deinotherium fossils, which dated it to the early Pleistocene.

  Boswell would not have this. He felt that since no scientist had seen the jaw in situ, it could not be accepted. Finally, after much argument, and some ambiguous chemical testing, the experts decided that the jaw and skulls were at most 20 to 30,000 years old.

  The real problem, of course, was that if Leakey’s finds and Reck’s skeleton had been accepted as Homo sapiens, then the history of mankind would have to be revised. Java man and Peking man suggested a simple line of descent from ape-like creatures of half a million years ago, and Leakey was suggesting that these were mere cousins of Homo sapiens, who—as Wallace believed—had been around since the Tertiary.

  Leakey had already given way on Reck’s skeleton, but this time he dug in his heels. He had declared in his Stone Age Races of Kenya that the Kanam tooth was not merely the oldest human fragment from Africa, but the most ancient fragment of true Homo yet discovered in the world. Even his biographer, Sonia Cole, deplores this refusal to change his mind, and regards it as a sign of sheer stubbornness.

  But more conventional anthropologists were about to receive the most powerful support yet.

  In 1924, Dr Raymond Dart, the professor of anatomy at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, received two cratesful of fossils from a limestone quarry at a place called Taung, 200 miles south-west of Johannesburg. The Darts were about to give a wedding party, and Mrs Dart begged him to ignore them until the guests had gone. But Dart’s curiosity was too great. And in the second crate, he found himself looking into a piece of rock containing the rear part of a skull. And it was obvious that the brain it had once contained was as large as that of a sizeable gorilla. Nearby he found a piece of rock containing the front part of the skull. The moment the last guest had departed, Dart borrowed his wife’s knitting needles, and began chipping away the stone. It took almost three months, and on 23 December, the rock parted, and he was able to look at the face. He then realised that this creature with a large brain was—incredibly—a baby with milk teeth. A baby with a 500 cc
brain had to be some form of human being. But Dart reckoned that the level at which it had been found was at least a million years old.

  When his account of the Taung skull appeared in Nature on 7 February 1925, he became an overnight celebrity. Surely this had to be the missing link?

  Many experts disagreed, and suggested that the Taung baby was an ape. Sir Arthur Keith, one of the great authorities, had a different reason for rejecting the baby as the missing link. If it was a million years old, and Cro-Magnon man was about 100,000 years old, there was simply not time for the Taung baby to develop into Homo sapiens.

  But to begin with, Dart’s skull aroused widespread attention. Then the tone of comment began to change. By 1931, the scientific establishment had turned against him. In that year, he appeared before the Zoological Society of London, together with Davidson Black, who had discovered Peking man. Davidson Black’s presentation was highly professional, with visual aids; by comparison, Dart, clutching his baby skull, looked bumbling and unconvincing. A monograph on the skull, which he called Australopithecus (southern ape) was rejected by the Royal Society.

  Dart went back to South Africa and buried himself in his department of anatomy. Like Leakey, he had not changed his mind, but he decided to keep this fact to himself.

  One of Dart’s warmest supporters was a retired zoologist named Robert Broom. Now Broom decided to emerge from retirement to take up arms. In 1936, the supervisor of a Sterkfontein limestone quarry handed Broom another rock containing an ancient skull fragment, which proved to be from an adult Australopithecine. Then a femur (thigh-bone) was found, and it looked unmistakably human. In 1938, Broom located a schoolboy with a pocket-full of teeth and fragments of jaw-bone, and these enabled him to recognise that he had discovered a new type of Australopithecus, which he called Paranthropus (nearman) robustus. This seemed to be a vegetarian type of Australopithecus. The fact that he was a vegetarian seemed to suggest that he might be an animal rather than a human ancestor.

  In 1947, Broom found another Paranthropus fossil in a cave at Swartkrans; he also found a small and more human-like creature, which he called Teleanthropus. Later, he decided that it belonged to the same species as Java man and Peking man, which had now been classified as a type called Homo erectus, and generally accepted as a direct ancestor of modern man. Stone and bone tools also found at Swartkrans seemed to indicate that Paranthropus was a true man.

  Broom’s activity stirred Dart to emerge from his retirement. In 1948, he went back to a tunnel in Makapansgat, where he had found bones in 1925. He had also found some evidence of fire, which had confirmed his opinion that Australopithecus was humanoid. Now he found more bones and more evidence of fire, and labelled the creature who lived there Australopithecus prometheus.

  But Dart found something altogether more interesting at Makapansgat—42 baboon skulls, of which 27 showed signs of having been struck by some kind of club. He concluded that the club—which made two indentations—was an antelope’s humerus (upper leg-bone). This led him to the startling conclusion that Australopithecus had been a killer—the first known human ancestor to use a weapon. He went on to develop the thesis that southern ape-man had emerged from the apes for one reason only—because he had learned to commit murder with weapons. In 1961, a playwright-turned-anthropologist named Robert Ardrey gave the idea wide popular currency in a book called African Genesis, which argued that man became man because he learned how to kill, and that unless he unlearns it soon, he will destroy the human race.

  In 1953, the year that Dart published his controversial paper The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man, Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum subjected the Piltdown skull to fluorine tests, and revealed it to be a hoax. In the 1930s, Sir Arthur Keith had cited the Piltdown skull to discredit Australopithecus, for it seemed to show that ‘intelligence came first’. Now the skull was discredited, the opposition to Dart’s Australopithecus began to melt away, and Dart’s theory of the killer ape was suddenly made horribly plausible. Here at last was an evolutionary theory that seemed designed to prove Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

  But the battle was not yet quite over.

  Louis Leakey was also back again and, together with his wife Mary, was digging in the Olduvai Gorge. There in bed 1, below the level of Reck’s skeleton, he found crude pebble choppers, and round stones that might have been used as a bolas—two or three balls on a leather thong, used for throwing around an animal’s legs. He even found a bone that might have been a leather working tool.

  But when, in 1959, he found skull fragments of a creature similar to Australopithecus robustus, he was disappointed. His wife admitted that, after 30 years, he was still hoping to find Homo sapiens. He called his new ape-man Zinjanthropus—Zinj meaning East Africa. Oddly enough, he decided that the tools at the site belonged to Zinjanthropus, although they suggested a creature of more intelligence.

  At least, Zinjanthropus restored Leakey’s standing among palaeontologists; it looked as if he had repented his earlier heresies. One year later, his son Jonathan found another skull in bed 1, below Zinjanthropus. This had a larger brain than Zinjanthropus—680 cc compared to 530—but was still smaller than Homo erectus skulls (at around 800). A nearby hand and foot found by Louis and Mary Leakey were undeniably human. Tools found in the area also indicated that this was a human ancestor. At Dart’s suggestion, Leakey called it Homo habilis, tool-making man.

  Leakey was rather pleased with himself. Before Homo habilis, palaeo-anthropologists had assumed that Homo erectus was the direct descendant of Australopithecus. Now Leakey had shown that a more truly human ancestor interposed between the two. Admittedly, this was something of a climb-down after his earlier belief that Homo sapiens might be found in the early Pleistocene. But it was better than nothing. In fact, Leakey still showed traces of the old heretic when he remarked that he felt that Australopithecus showed various specialised developments that did not lead towards man.

  But there were many stone tools found at Pleistocene sites that left no doubt that some early man was a tool maker. Yet such tools were never found in association with Australopithecus remains.

  By now—the late 1960s—Louis Leakey’s son Richard and his wife Meave had joined the search for human origins. In August 1972, one of Richard Leakey’s team found a shattered skull at Lake Turkana. Reconstructed by Meave Leakey, it looked much more human than Australopithecus, with a domed forehead and a brain capacity of over 800 cc. Leakey estimated that it was about 2.9 million years old. He decided that it was another specimen of Homo habilis. But if it was that old, then it was a contemporary of Australopithecus, and that meant that Australopithecus might not after all be a human ancestor. Leakey suggested that Australopithecus had vanished from prehistory like the Neanderthals.

  J. D. Birdsell, the author of a book called Human Evolution, was inclined to date Richard Leakey’s Homo habilis at about two million years ago. But he was troubled about Leakey’s assertion that Homo habilis led to Homo erectus. It seemed to Birdsell that Homo habilis was more anatomically ‘modern’ than Homo erectus, and that development from Homo habilis to Homo erectus would be a retrogressive step. He was inclined to agree with Richard’s father Louis Leakey that probably Homo erectus was not a main part of the human line.

  Interesting evidence for a more ‘human’ ancestor continued to turn up. Leakey was summoned by a colleague named John Harris to look at a human-like femur (thigh-bone) found among elephant bones in deposits older than 2.6 million years. More missing parts were found on further search. Again, they were unlike those of Australopithecus, and more like those of modern man. Leakey felt that they demonstrated that this creature—Homo habilis—walked upright all the time, while Australopithecus walked upright only some of the time. When a technique called potassium-argon dating seemed to show that the layer of material—known as tuff—in which the bones were found was 2.9 million years old, it certainly looked as if this Homo habilis was the oldest human specimen ever found.

 
But there was to be yet another twist to the story.

  In 1973, a young anthropologist from the University of Chicago, Donald Johanson, was at a conference in Nairobi, where he met Richard Leakey. He mentioned to Leakey that a French geologist had told him of a promising site at Hadar, in the Afar desert of north-eastern Ethiopia, and that he was now on his way there to search for hominid fossils. When Leakey asked if he really expected to find hominids, Johanson replied: ‘Yes, older than yours.’ They bet a bottle of wine on it.

  In fact, things went badly during the first season. Johanson failed to find fossils, and his grant was running out. But one afternoon, he found a tibia—the bone of the lower leg. A further search uncovered the knee joint and part of the upper bone. The deposits in which they were found was over three million years old. In his paper reporting the find, Johanson suggested that it could be four million years old, and gave his reasons for thinking it was humanoid. His discovery brought him another $25,000 in grants.

  On 30 November 1974, Johanson and his colleague Tom Gray were searching another Hadar site, and as the temperature reached 103, were preparing to quit. But Johanson had been ‘feeling lucky’ all day, and insisted on looking in a gulley that had already been searched. There he saw a piece of arm bone that looked like a monkey. Gray went on to find a fragment of skull and a part of a femur. When they found other parts of a skeleton, they went into a kind of wild war dance of triumph. Later, as they were celebrating back at camp, and playing a Beatles record called ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, they decided to call their find (whose small size suggested a female) Lucy. Potassium-argon dating and magnetic dating methods showed Lucy to be about 3.5 million years old.