Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [444]
In the March 18 issue of Nature, C. Stanton Hicks, of the University of Adelaide, Australia, complained about the disadvantages of practicing science in the outlying regions of the British Empire: “The old-established scientific societies with all their tradition and prestige, their facilities for publication and criticism of original work, and their influence in paving the way to higher posts, are in Great Britain.” Leakey was a colonial, born and raised in British East Africa. In the conference convened to review his discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, this promising young scientist’s fate hung in the balance. He would perhaps be accepted into the elite circles of British science, and given a post at Cambridge, or perhaps be banished into obscurity, lucky to occupy a professorship in an outlying university. It is quite possible Leakey thought it best to withdraw his reputation from somebody else’s controversial fossil and thus pave the way for acceptance of his own better-dated finds at Kanam and Kanjera. After all, some of the most vocal opponents of Reck’s skeleton, such as Boswell, Solomon, Cooper, Watson, and Mollison, would be sitting on the committee that would review the Kanam jaw and Kanjera skulls. As we shall see, the committee accepted the Kanam and Kanjera finds.
In his memoirs, Louis Leakey (1972, pp. 37–38) gave a brief and somewhat confusing review of his involvement with Reck’s skeleton. He said the debate about the skeleton’s age was resolved by a mineral analysis conducted by Boswell after a 1935 visit to Olduvai Gorge. This version is repeated, almost verbatim, in Cole’s 1975 biography of Leakey. But, as far as we can tell, Boswell’s mineral analysis was performed in 1933, and the results were reported in the March 18, 1933 letter to Nature, signed by Boswell, Leakey, Reck, Hopwood, and Solomon.
According to the new view outlined in the March 1933 letter, intact Beds III and IV at Olduvai Gorge were stripped away by erosion at the location of the skeleton. Bed II, thus exposed, would have probably still been covered by some remnants of Bed III and perhaps a thin layer of calcrete, or steppe-lime. The burial supposedly took place at this time. Subsequent to the burial, the layers of Bed V, including thick, hard layers of calcrete, were deposited. The authors of the March 1933 letter said: “it seems certain that the skeleton was deposited where it was found before the main mass of Bed V, and the overlying steppe-lime were formed, that is, the skeleton appears to have been buried at the time of the existence of the old land surface connected with the steppe-lime at the base of Bed V” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, pp. 397–398).
This still gives a potentially anomalous age for the fully human Reck’s skeleton. The base of Bed V is about 400,000 years old, according to current estimates (Table 11.1, p. 629). Therefore, even according to the revised position taken by Reck and Leakey, the skeleton could be at least 400,000 years old. This is true even if, as Boswell claimed in his August 1932 letter, the matrix sample supplied by Mollison contained deep red pebbles like those of Bed III and pieces of steppe-lime with a mineral characteristic of Bed IV. Today, however, most scientists believe that Homo sapiens sapiens first appeared about 100,000 years ago, as shown by the Border Cave discoveries in South Africa.
The March 1933 letter to Nature concluded with some interesting observations about stone tools found “in the basal deposits of Bed V” and on an “old land surface” at the same level as the steppe-lime just below Bed V. These tools, said the authors, had “very close affinities with the phase C of the Upper Kenyan Aurignacian” (Leakey et al. 1933, p. 398). Archeologists first used the term Aurignacian in connection with the finely-made artifacts of Cro-Magnon man (Homo sapiens sapiens) found