Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [30]
In the following days, as fragments of the skull were slowly removed, Leakey became all the more convinced that it belonged to an early type of human. It had a mixture of features: a flat face, a flat nose, wide cheekbones, a massive jaw, big back teeth, tiny front teeth, hardly any forehead and a bony crest running the length of its skull. But what ultimately persuaded Leakey was that the skull had been found in an area replete with stone tools. The common view at the time was that toolmaking defined the boundary between human and pre-human; it was said to be the hallmark of humankind. Like most scientists, Leakey believed that australopithecines, because of their small brains, had been incapable of making tools. His assumption was that Olduvai’s stone tools could only have been made by an early type of human and that therefore the skull that had been found had to be human.
On his return to Nairobi in August, Leakey lost no time in sending an article to Nature announcing that he had found ‘the oldest maker of stone tools’ yet discovered. While acknowledging that the skull bore some resemblance to australopithecines, he argued that the differences warranted placing it in a separate genus. ‘I therefore propose to name the new skull Zinjanthropus boisei’.
The name was a concoction of Zinj, an old Arabic word for the coast of eastern Africa; anthropos from the Greek word for man; and boisei in honour of Charles Boise, the Leakeys’ loyal benefactor. But the Leakeys themselves referred to the skull more affectionately as ‘Dear Boy’.
‘Zinj’ became one of the most famous fossils ever discovered. Soon after returning to Nairobi, Leakey embarked on a world tour to show it to admiring audiences. His address to the fourth Pan-African Congress on Prehistory in Léopoldville, capital of the Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa) at the end of August, with Zinj balanced next to him on the podium, created a sensation. Among the delegates were Raymond Dart and his young protégé Phillip Tobias, the newly appointed Professor of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand. ‘There was tremendous applause’, recalled Tobias, ‘and not just a murmur of conversation, but quite hysterically excited conversation from everyone present’. Impressed by the size of its jaw and teeth, Tobias remarked: ‘I have never seen a more remarkable set of nutcrackers’, providing the press with an instant nickname: Nutcracker Man.
The occasion was not quite the triumph that Leakey wanted, however. Many scientists observed that Zinj possessed strong similarities to South Africa’s ‘robust’ australopithecines, as Leakey himself had initially thought, and they drew the opposite conclusion to Leakey about the presence of stone tools: Instead of proving that Zinj was human, it meant that small-brained australopithecines might have been capable of making tools. Furthermore, they were critical of Leakey for adding yet another genus and species to the list, with seemingly little justification.
Nevertheless, excitement about Nutcracker Man spread across the globe. In London, Leakey and Zinj were treated as celebrities. A talk that Leakey gave to the British Academy in Piccadilly was packed. ‘Television stars like Sir Mortimer Wheeler [a prominent archaeologist] had to stand against the wall’, reported one newspaper. Leakey was greeted with similar acclaim during a marathon tour of the United States. Over the course of a month, he delivered sixty-six lectures at seventeen universities