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Sir Arthur Keith wrote in 1947: “When Professor Dart of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, announced in Nature the discovery of a juvenile Australopithecus and claimed for it a human kinship, I was one of those who took the point of view that when the adult form was discovered it would prove to be nearer akin to the living African anthropoids—the gorilla and the chimpanzee. Like Professor Le Gros Clark I am now convinced on the evidence submitted by Dr. Robert Broom that Professor Dart was right and I was wrong. The Australopithecinae are in or near the line which culminated in the human form” (Dart 1959, pp. 80–81). At long last, Australopithecus had won recognition in the power centers of British paleoanthropology.

11.3.7 Controversy Continues

With the new status of Australopithecus came a change in perception. Increasingly, the vast majority of scientists began to see Australopithecus as less and less apelike and more and more humanlike. Right up to the present, the place of Australopithecus in the direct line of human descent is taken as an indisputable fact by most paleoanthropologists. Pictures of australopithecines generally show them as essentially human from the neck down. Furthermore, the types of behavior displayed by the australopithecines in these pictures are such that figures of humans could be easily substituted. But even after mainstream English science changed its mind about Australopithecus, some scientists resisted. To these recalcitrant renegades, the undistorted facts continued to reveal a starkly apelike portrait of Australopithecus. According to their view, a picture of an Australopithecus individual should show it hanging by its arms from the branch of a tree rather than walking erect and humanlike on the ground.

The primary dissenter, in the early aftermath of English acceptance of Australopithecus, was Sir Solly Zuckerman, secretary of the Zoological Society of London and later a science adviser to the British government. In a comprehensive study, Zuckerman (1954) found that the teeth, skull, jaws, brain, and limbs of Australopithecus were essentially apelike. He therefore believed that attempts to identify australopithecines as human ancestors were misguided. Today, a new generation of dissident researchers is raising and sustaining the same objections to overly humanlike characterizations of Australopithecus. We shall give detailed attention to their views, and those of Zuckerman, in Section 11.8.

11.4 Leakey and His Luck

After the professional and personal disappointments he encountered in the late 1930s, Louis Leakey continued his work in East Africa, assisted by his second wife, Mary. They searched for fossils of Early Pleistocene human ancestors, which Leakey believed would be quite different from Australopithecus and Homo erectus. Eventually, the Leakeys would get lucky and make a series of important finds. But for decades they had to be content with stone tools.

11.4.1 Zinjanthropus

A site of particular interest was Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. There the Leakeys found crude pebble choppers in Bed I, said to be 1.7 to 2.0 million years old (Oakley et al. 1977, p. 169). They also found round stones that appeared to have been used as bolas (Section 5.3.2). Leakey even found a bone implement he believed had been used for working leather. The standard image of Early Pleistocene hominids is one of ape-men scavenging carcasses of lion kills, not of protohumans working leather and hunting with bolas.

The stone tools Leakey found at Olduvai were not enough to satisfy him. “The remains of the men themselves still elude us,” he said (Goodman 1983, p. 111). Finally, on July 17, 1959, Mary Leakey came across the shattered skull of a young male hominid in Bed I at site FLK. The skull was designated OH 5.

By one account, Leakey came out, looked at the OH 5 skull, and instead of rejoicing said: “Why, it’s nothing but a goddamned robust australopithecine” (Johanson and Edey 1981, pp. 91–92). “When he saw the teeth he was disappointed