Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [32]
Assessing the evidence, Louis Leakey became increasingly convinced that the fossils from ‘Jonny’s site’ represented a new species, a primitive Homo, possibly the toolmaker he had long sought. He was also struck by the similar age of the two sites. The fossils at ‘Jonny’s site’ had come from deposits one foot lower than the Zinj deposits, making them slightly older but contemporary. What this meant, Leakey believed, was that ‘two entirely distinct hominids’ had lived together at Olduvai, ‘side by side’.
Determined to avoid controversy, Louis compiled a straightforward report of the new discoveries for publication in Nature in February 1961, refraining from speculation. He gave a similarly cautious account at a press conference at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington in February. The skull, he said, belonged to a juvenile about eleven years old. Because it had lived many thousands of years before Zinjanthropus, it was known simply as ‘pre-Zinjanthropus’. He went no further than to say that it seemed to be ‘a quite distinct type of hominid’.
But when a reporter asked him what had caused a hole in the skull and the fracture radiating from it, Leakey could not resist a bit of speculation and opened up a new chapter of controversy. The child had died, he suggested, as the result of an injury. ‘I think we can take it for granted that the child was hit on the head by a blunt instrument. It was murder most foul’.
Newspapers around the world seized on the idea, running headlines proclaiming ‘World’s First Murder’. In England, the scientific establishment, noting that Leakey’s account in Nature had made no mention of a blow to the head, reacted with disdain. A correspondent for the London Times reported: ‘British anthropologists were left wondering during the weekend what new consideration of evidence had led Dr L.S.B. Leakey ... to bring in a verdict of murder, hundreds of thousands of years after the event’. The New Scientist rebuked Leakey for indulging in ‘wild speculations’ and accused him of making an important field of science look ‘more than a little ridiculous’. The magazine Punch ran a satirical article entitled ‘More Secrets from the Past: Oboyoboi Gorge’, featuring the exploits of a well-known anthropologist Dr C.J.M. Crikey.
To help him establish a proper identity for ‘pre-Zinjanthropus’, Leakey sought the opinion of a number of other experts. Among them was Wilfred Le Gros Clark, Britain’s leading palaeoanthropologist. From the outset, Le Gros Clark was doubtful about Leakey’s claim about a new hominid; from all the evidence he had seen, he told Leakey in June 1961, he considered the fossils to be inseparable from Australopithecus. The South African anatomist Phillip Tobias took a similar view. ‘My present feeling about the child is that it is an australopithecine’, he wrote in May 1962 after studying the skull.
Leakey insisted, however, that ‘pre-Zinjanthropus’ was not an australopithecine. ‘Mary and I are sure (more and more so every time we go over the data) that it is NOT Australopithecus’, he wrote to Tobias in December 1962. Instead, he argued, it was ‘a very primitive Homo’.
But Tobias continued to hold out. A major obstacle he faced was the size of the brain. The scientific consensus at the time was that a hominid needed to exceed a certain brain size to qualify for the genus Homo. According to Le Gros Clark, a large brain was a ‘distinctive human trait’. Although there was no agreement among anatomists about a specific threshold, the general size they settled on ranged from 700 to 800 cubic centimetres.
The first estimate that Tobias gave for the ‘pre-Zinj’ brain size was between 600 and 700 cubic centimetres. He told Leakey that this made it ‘difficult to reconcile with Homo’. But Leakey would not relent. ‘Phillip took a lot of persuading’, Mary Leakey recalled. ‘Louis had to bludgeon Phillip to convince him. No one lightly names a new hominid species. But Louis loved it’.
The turning point came in 1963 when Mary found further specimens that appeared to be related