Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [454]
Tobias (1962, p. 344) said about the Kanam jaw: “Nothing that Boswell said really discredited or even weakened the claim of Leakey that the mandible belonged to the stratum in question, nor did Boswell deny the faunal and cultural associations previously attributed to this stratum. . . . a number of subsequent writers have gratuitously assumed that Boswell’s report invalidated all Leakey’s claims. Although Leakey answered some of Boswell’s specific criticisms, the reply has seldom been quoted and little cognizance has seemingly been taken of it.” But, as we shall see below, Tobias had his own ideas about the age and evolutionary status of the Kanam jaw.
11.2.7 Morphology of the kanam jaw
Scientists have described the Kanam jaw in a multiplicity of ways. In 1932, a committee of English anatomists proclaimed it Homo sapiens (Woodward et al.
1933). Louis Leakey initially attributed the jaw to a new species, Homo kanamensis, a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens. But his biographer Sonia Cole (1975, pp. 103–104) said he soon gave up that designation in favor of Homo sapiens. Sir Arthur Keith (1935, p. 163), the dean of British anthropologists, also considered the Kanam jaw Homo sapiens. But in the 1940s Keith decided the jaw was most likely from an australopithecine (Tobias 1968, p. 180).
Tobias, an expert on the Australopithecinae, disagreed. After comparing the Kanam jaw with available Australopithecus jaws, Tobias (1968, p. 181) found it was, among other things, “much less robust” and different in the “general conformation and orientation” of the front part of the jaw.
Tobias (1962, p. 341) suggested that some of the sapiens-like features of the front part of the Kanam jaw might be, at least partially, the result of bone growth in response to a tumor on the inner surface of the front part of the jaw. Tobias was, however, not the first to notice the tumor.
Almost 20 years earlier, Sir Arthur Keith (1935, p. 163) wrote: “the chin of this representative of early humanity was the seat of a bony tumour of an exceedingly rare kind. The tumour, which grew from the deep aspect of the jaw, just behind the chin, has spread over and obscured the normal features of this region. Enough remains, however, to make quite certain that in dimensions and in its features, the chin region of this early being was shaped as in primitive types of living humanity—such as the aborigines of Australia.” In other words, Keith, at that time, took the chin features to be within the range of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Despite the effects of the bone tumor on the inner surface of the chin, Tobias (1962, p. 349) thought the lower front part of the Kanam jaw had some features like that of the modern human chin—although not as well developed. For example, the Kanam jaw, like the human jaw, has a pronounced incurvation below the level of the teeth and an outward swelling of the bone at the base of the front part of the jaw (Figures 11.4g–h).
But Tobias also called attention to the depth and thickness of the jaw, the relatively large size of some of the teeth, and other features that he regarded as primitive. Tobias (1962, p. 355) observed: “Several, though not all, of these features might be encountered individually as exceptional variants among modern African mandibles.” He thought the Kanam jaw most closely resembled the late Middle Pleistocene mandible from Rabat in Morocco, and Upper Pleistocene mandibles such as those from the Cave of Hearths in South Africa and Dire-Dawa in Ethiopia (Tobias 1968, p. 181).
Recent workers class Rabat and Cave of Hearths as “early archaic Homo sapiens” (Bräuer 1984,