Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [50]
Other scientists lined up to support her. The American geologist Richard Hay described the use that Johanson-White had made of the Laetoli fossils as ‘a form of scientific theft’. The eminent zoologist Ernst Mayr, an expert on taxonomy, was scathing about the way they had taken the type specimen from Tanzania but the name from Ethiopia. ‘If you select a geographical locality for the name, then you have no choice but to select the type specimen from the same locality’. The two sets of fossils were located 1,000 miles apart and separated by half a million years in time, leaving open the possibility that they were geographic variants induced by climatic and other environmental conditions. ‘Every species consists of numerous local populations differing to the degree of their isolation’. The proper decision therefore, said Mayr, would have been to name Lucy as the type specimen. ‘It was a horrible thing that Johanson did’, he told Virginia Morell, ‘... and made everyone’s hair stand on end’. He wanted the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to suppress Johanson’s type designation and designate instead a specimen from Afar.
Further doubt about the Johanson-White hypothesis was cast by Yves Coppens, the French co-leader of the Afar expedition who had previously agreed to be listed as a joint author in the naming paper published by Kirtlandia. Coppens published an article saying that, like Richard Leakey, he recognised at least two species among the Hadar fossils, not just one. As well as bones belonging to afarensis, he detected a primitive species of Homo present, too.
From South Africa, Phillip Tobias, Professor of Anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand, weighed in with his own broadside. Tobias saw no reason Australopithecus africanus should be usurped by afarensis as the progenitor of all later hominids. The Laetoli and Hadar hominids, he declared, were indeed subspecies, but of africanus not afarensis. He suggested that the Hadar hominids should be named Australopithecus africanus aethiopicus and the Laetoli hominids Australopithecus africanus tanzaniensis. Addressing an international scientific meeting in London in March 1980, he called for the term afarensis to be scrapped: ‘Since the tying of the name “A. afarensis” to the Laetoli fossils is manifestly inappropriate and since it is considered that the case for “A. afarensis” has not been established, it is proposed formally that the name “A. afarensis” be suppressed’.
Despite all the hubbub, the Johanson-White hypothesis gradually gained favour, and Australopithecus afarensis duly became accepted by most of the scientific community as the oldest member in the pantheon of ancient ancestors yet discovered. The picture that emerged was of a hominid weighing from seventy-five to 125 pounds, between three and four feet tall, with a brain volume of between 400 and 500 cubic centimetres, only a little larger than the average brain size of a chimpanzee.
After studying the Hadar hominids, Owen Lovejoy, an expert on the biomechanics of locomotion at Kent State University in Ohio, concluded that afarensis hominids were well-adapted bipeds. ‘They look incredibly primitive above the neck and incredibly modern below. The knee looks very much like a modern human joint; the pelvis is fully adapted for upright walking; and the foot, although a curious mixture of ancient and modern, is adequately structured for bipedalism. Some of the bones in the feet are slightly curved, and look rather like the bones you’d expect to see in its ancestor who climbed trees. But I believe that the curvature in the afarensis foot bones is well suited for walking on soft, sandy terrain; it probably inherited the curved feet from its tree-climbing ancestors, but the shape has been made use of in a different way’.
The upright gait of afarensis led many palaeoanthropologists to conclude that Lucy and her kind, though descended from treedwelling ancestors, were terrestrial creatures that spent their whole time at ground level. But further studies by researchers at