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And in People of the Lake (R. Leakey and Lewin 1978, p. 17), Leakey said: “If someone went to the trouble of collecting together in one room all the fossil remains so far discovered of our ancestors (and their biological relatives) who lived, say, between five and one million years ago, he would need only a couple of large trestle tables on which to spread them out. . . . Yet with a confidence that may strike the uninitiated as something close to supernatural—if not to plain madness—prehistorians can now construct a view of human origins that is anything but crude, and may even bear some resemblance to the truth.” The evidence on the trestle tables would not, of course, be complete. Much has been suppressed or forgotten, and if it were placed back on the tables, it would be harder for confident prehistorians to construct plausible evolutionary lineages.

11.6.3 Humanlike Femurs From Koobi Fora

Some distance from where the ER 1470 skull had been found, but at the same level, John Harris, a paleontologist from the Kenya National Museum, discovered a quite humanlike upper leg bone. Harris summoned Richard Leakey (1973b, pp. 823, 828), who later reported: “Amid a mass of shattered elephant bone lay both ends of the femur of a remarkably advanced hominid. Further search turned up the missing pieces, parts of the tibia and a fragment of the fibula.

. . . John also discovered another femur. All these leg bones lay in deposits older than 2.6 million years. Do they belong to our new-found ‘1470 man?’ Frustratingly, we cannot be sure. It is quite clear, however, that these femurs are unlike those of Australopithecus, and astonishingly similar to those of modern man.” The femurs would later be attributed to Homo habilis.

The first femur, with associated fragments of tibia and fibula, was designated ER 1481 and the other ER 1472. An additional fragment of femur was designated ER 1475. Like the ER 1470 skull, the femurs were found on the surface. But Richard Leakey (1973a, p. 448) wrote in Nature: “The unrolled condition of the specimens and the nature of the sites rules out the possibility of secondary deposition—there is no doubt in the minds of the geologists that the provenance is as reported. All the specimens are heavily mineralized and the adhering matrix is similar to the matrix seen on other fossils from the same sites.” In other words, Leakey was certain the bones had recently weathered out of the fossil-bearing deposits from below the KBS Tuff.

Leakey (1973a, p. 450) stated in a scientific journal that these leg bones “cannot be readily distinguished from H. sapiens if one considers the range of variation known for this species.” In a National Geographic article, Leakey (1973b, p. 821) repeated this view, saying the leg bones were “almost indistinguishable from those of Homo sapiens.”

Comparing the newly found ER 1481 femur with a femur of Australopithecus, Leakey (1973b, p. 828) said: “The more ovoid, less robust shaft neck of Australopithecus implies that the latter, though capable of walking upright, did so only for short periods.” The “stronger neck shaft” of the new femur, Leakey (1973b, p. 828) added, “suggests its owner probably walked upright as his normal mode of locomotion.”

Concerning ER 1481, Richard Leakey (1973a, p. 450) wrote: “When the femur is compared with a restricted sample of modern African bones, there are marked similarities in those morphological features that are widely considered characteristic of modern H. sapiens. The fragments of tibia and fibula also resemble H. sapiens.” He further stated: “The head of the femur is large and set on a robust cylindrical neck which takes off from the shaft at a more obtuse angle than in known Australopithecus femurs” (R. Leakey 1973a, pp. 449–450).

Other scientists agreed with Leakey’s analysis. In 1976, B. A. Wood, anatomist at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in London, showed that in terms of three critical variables (femur neck length, femur head size, and femur neck shape), the ER 1472 and ER 1481 femurs