Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [443]
Keep in mind, however, that Reck, who examined the skeleton in situ, saw no signs of limestone chips or bright red pebbles, although he looked carefully for them. This suggests that no burial activity disturbed any layers of limestonelike calcrete in Beds II, III, IV, or V.
The debate about the age of Reck’s skeleton became more complicated when Leakey brought new soil samples from Olduvai. Boswell and J. D. Solomon studied them at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. They reported their findings in the March 18, 1933 issue of Nature, in a letter signed also by Leakey, Reck, and Hopwood.
The letter contained this very intriguing statement: “Samples of Bed II, actually collected at the ‘man site,’ at the same level and in the immediate vicinity of the place where the skeleton was found consist of pure and wholly typical Bed II material, and differ very markedly from the samples of matrix of the skeleton which were supplied by Prof. Mollison from Munich” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, p. 397). This adds to our suspicion that the matrix sample supplied by Mollison to Boswell may not have been representative of the material closely surrounding Reck’s skeleton.
Reck and Leakey, however, apparently concluded from the new observations that the matrix sample from Reck’s skeleton was in fact some kind of grave filling, different from pure Bed II material. As far as we can tell, they offered no satisfactory explanation for their previous opinion that the skeleton had been found in pure, unmistakable Bed II materials.
Instead, both Reck and Leakey joined Boswell, Hopwood, and Solomon in concluding that “it seems highly probable that the skeleton was intrusive into Bed II and that the date of the intrusion is not earlier than the great unconformity which separates Bed V from the lower series” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, p. 397).
It remains somewhat of a mystery why both Reck and Leakey changed their minds about a Bed II date for Reck’s skeleton. Perhaps Reck was simply tired of fighting an old battle against odds that seemed more and more overwhelming. At the time Reck had discovered his skeleton, many scientists were still somewhat uncertain about the evolutionary status of Dubois’s Middle Pleistocene Java man. This left some room for controversial discoveries such as Reck’s. But by the 1930s, after Black’s discovery of Beijing man, the scientific community had become more uniformly committed to the idea that a transitional ape-man was the only proper inhabitant of the Middle Pleistocene. An anatomically modern Homo sapiens skeleton in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge did not make sense except as a fairly recent burial.
Leakey, almost alone, remained very much opposed to the idea that Java man (Pithecanthropus) and Beijing man (Sinanthropus) were human ancestors. In his discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, he believed he had indisputable evidence for the presence of Homo sapiens in the same period as Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus (and Reck’s skeleton). So perhaps he abandoned the fight over Reck’s highly controversial skeleton in order to strengthen support for his own recent finds at Kanam and Kanjera.
There is substantial circumstantial evidence in support of this hypothesis. In the issue of Nature (March 25, 1933) immediately following the one carrying Leakey’s reversal on Reck’s skeleton (March 18, 1933), there appeared the following notice in Nature’s “News and Views” section: “On March 18–19 a conference summoned by the Royal Anthropological Institute met at St. John’s College, Cambridge, under the presidency of Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, to receive reports on the human skeletal remains discovered by Dr. Leakey’s archaeological expedition to East Africa in the autumn of last year.” We shall discuss the conference report later in this chapter (Section 11.2.3). For now, we simply