Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [23]
Leakey was confident that the mandible was extremely old, dating back to early Pleistocene times, more than 500,000 years. He lost no time in alerting the outside world to his discovery, sending a despatch to Nature on 19 April.
‘The importance of this Kanam mandible’, Leakey wrote in a subsequent book, The Stone Age Races of Kenya, ‘lies in the fact that it can be dated geologically, palaeontologically and archaeologically, and that it represents the oldest known human fragment yet found in the African continent ... It is not only the oldest known human fragment from Africa, but the most ancient fragment of true Homo yet discovered anywhere in the world’.
Leakey earned high praise for his expeditions in East Africa. At a meeting in Cambridge in March 1933, when a group of twenty-six scientists gathered to review his work, Leakey was congratulated for the ‘exceptional significance’ of his discoveries. The London Times, reporting on the outcome of the meeting, suggested that Leakey’s work had lent plausibility to the theory that ‘Africa is the cradle of the human race’.
But his downfall soon followed.
The first dent to his reputation came from the findings of independent geologists who made a series of tests on Oldoway Man and the surrounding soil samples where it had been found. Their conclusion was that the body had been buried in Bed II in comparatively recent times. (Subsequent Carbon-14 tests dated the skeleton to 19,000 years ago.)
Despite the evidence, Leakey fought on for months in defence of his views. ‘He made a bit of a fool of himself by his vehement insistence’, recalled John Solomon, a geologist colleague. ‘It showed that his attitude in those years was not that of a “scientist”, but of an “enthusiast”’.
A far more damaging controversy erupted over the Kanam mandible. In 1934, an eminent geologist, Percy Boswell, Professor of Geology at Imperial College, London, arrived at the sites at Kanjera and Kanam to inspect Leakey’s fieldwork. A stickler for detail, Boswell had been sceptical from the outset about Leakey’s claims. He had previously played a leading role in demolishing Leakey’s arguments about the age of Oldoway Man. To allay his concerns, Leakey invited him to visit the Kenya sites while he was there on his fourth expedition.
For Leakey, the trip proved to be a disaster. He found difficulty in identifying the exact location of the discoveries made three years before. Not only had he failed to make proper geological maps at the time, but iron pegs that he had cemented into the ground to mark the spot had meanwhile been removed by local fishermen to make fishing harpoons and spears. The landscape, moreover, had been altered by erosion from heavy rainfall.
Even worse, a photograph that Leakey had used to illustrate the position of the Kanam mandible turned out to record not the mandible site itself but another location several hundred yards distant. Leakey’s own camera had malfunctioned in 1932, so afterward he had borrowed a friend’s photograph instead. When the friend remarked: ‘I am not sure that this is the exact spot’, Leakey is said to have replied, ‘Near enough’. The photograph had been displayed at an exhibition at the Royal College of Surgeons, alongside the jaw fragment. It was due to be published on the opening page of Leakey’s forthcoming book, The Stone Age Races of Kenya. In haste, Leakey was obliged to cable Oxford University Press asking the publisher to hold distribution of the book until an erratum slip had been inserted.
Boswell was distinctly unimpressed. ‘The Professor is in a bad humour over it’, Leakey recorded in his diary. On his return to England, Boswell sent a scathing account to Nature, published in March 1935, not only accusing Leakey of incompetence but implying he had fabricated evidence. ‘It is regrettable