Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [476]
11.6 Richard, Son of Leakey
Louis Leakey’s son Richard at first avoided fossil hunting, working instead as a safari organizer for clients including the National Geographic Society. Eventually, however, Richard took up the family profession. Although he had no university training, he began to develop his own reputation as a competent paleoanthropologist.
In 1967, Richard Leakey, then just 23 years old, led the Kenya section of an international paleoanthropological expedition to the Omo region of southern Ethiopia. Unhappy at having to turn over fossils he discovered to professional scientists, Leakey suddenly left the Omo site. He flew by helicopter to Koobi Fora, on the crocodile-infested eastern shores of Kenya’s Lake Rudolf, now called Lake Turkana. On his very first walk around Koobi Fora, Leakey found a stone tool and fossil pig jaw. The site was promising, but he needed funding in order to systematically develop it.
In January of 1968, Richard Leakey journeyed to Washington, D.C., where he got a grant of 25,000 dollars from the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. Returning to Kenya, Leakey set up a permanent camp at Koobi Fora.
That first year saw no major discoveries, but in 1969 Richard and his wife Meave found an australopithecine skull. Over the next few years, fossils of three more Australopithecus individuals turned up (R. Leakey 1973b, p. 820). Also, Glynn Isaac found hundreds of crude stone tools at several Early Pleistocene sites near Koobi Fora (R. Leakey 1973b, p. 820). Australopithecus was not known to have been a toolmaker. So who had made the tools?
11.6.1 Skull Er 1470
In August of 1972, Bernard Ngeneo, a member of Leakey’s team, found at Lake Turkana a shattered skull that appeared to give an answer. Richard’s wife Meave, a zoologist, reconstructed the skull, designated ER 1470. Alan Walker of the University of Nairobi estimated that its cranial capacity was over 810 cc (R. Leakey 1973a, p. 449), bigger than the robust australopithecines. For example, the robust OH 5 Australopithecus boisei specimen from Olduvai, formerly called Zinjanthropus, had a cranial capacity of just 530 cc (R. Leakey 1973a, p. 450). The ER 1470 skull was in fact as large as some smaller Homo erectus skulls, which range between 750 and 1100 cc. The average human skull is about 1400 cc. Among adult humans, the very lowest cranial capacities are in the low 800s (Brodrick 1971, p. 84).
Viewed from the rear, the sides of the reconstructed ER 1470 skull were nearly vertical, as in Homo sapiens. In Australopithecus and Homo erectus, the sides of the skull, seen from the rear, slope noticeably towards each other at the top (Figure 9.1, p. 556). Furthermore, the domed forehead of ER 1470 was not as receding as that of Australopithecus or Homo erectus, and the brow ridges were smaller. The skull walls of ER 1470 were thinner than those of Australopithecus or Homo erectus. Also, the foramen magnum, the opening in the base of the skull for the spinal cord, was located farther forward than in Australopithecus. In other words, several features of the somewhat primitive ER 1470 skull were characteristic of advanced species of the genus Homo ( Fix 1984, pp. 50–51; R. Leakey 1973a, p. 448 ).
Richard Leakey initially hesitated to designate a species for the ER 1470 skull, but eventually decided to call it Homo habilis. This strengthened the evidence for Homo habilis from Olduvai Gorge, announced by Louis Leakey in the 1960s.
What made the ER 1470 skull so unusual was its age. The stratum yielding the skull lay below the KBS Tuff, a volcanic deposit with a potassium-argon age of 2.6 million years. The