Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [479]
Although most scientists would never dream of it, one could consider attributing the Koobi Fora femurs to a hominid very much like modern Homo sapiens, living in Africa about 2.9 million years ago (about 2.0 million years ago if you choose to believe the revised date of 1.9 million years for the KBS Tuff).
The ER 1472 and ER 1481 femurs show that distinctly anomalous discoveries are not confined to the nineteenth century. They have continued to occur with astonishing regularity up to the present day, right under our very noses, so to speak, although hardly anyone recognizes them for what they are. In Africa alone, we are building up quite a catalog: Reck’s skeleton, the Kanam jaw, the Kanjera skulls, the Kanapoi humerus, the Gombore humerus, and now the Lake Turkana femurs. All have been either attributed to Homo sapiens or described as being very humanlike. Except for the Middle Pleistocene Kanjera skulls, all were discovered in Early Pleistocene or Pliocene contexts.
11.6.4 The ER 813 Talus
In 1974, B. A. Wood (1974a, p. 135) described a talus (ankle bone) found between the KBS Tuff, then given an age of 2.6 million years, and the overlying Koobi Fora Tuff, with an age of 1.57 million years. Wood compared the fossil talus, designated ER 813, with hundreds of others, including those of modern humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and other arboreal primates.
Using multivariate statistical techniques, Wood analyzed the ankle bones in terms of 3 angular and 5 linear measurements. He concluded: “In all the variates, the fossil aligned with the modern human tali” (Wood 1974a, p. 135). Wood further stated: “the functional implications of the canonical analysis results, combined with the close morphological affinity of the fossil talus with the modern human bones, make it possible that the locomotor pattern of this early hominid was like that of modern man” (1974a, p. 136).
If we accept the younger date for the KBS Tuff, the humanlike ER 813 talus would be 1.5 to 1.9 million years old, roughly contemporary with creatures designated as Australopithecus robustus, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis.
In a subsequent report, Wood (1976, pp. 500–501) said his tests confirmed “the similarity of KNM-ER 813 with modern human bones,” showing it to be “not significantly different from the tali of modern bushmen.” One could therefore consider the possibility that the KNM-ER 813 talus belonged to an anatomically modern human in the Early Pleistocene or Late Pliocene.
C. E. Oxnard (1975a, p. 121) wrote of ER 813: “description and examination using canonical analysis by Wood (1974) confirms that it is indeed very similar to modern man and is thus unlike the australopithecine specimens.” Challenging the ancestral status of Australopithecus, Oxnard (1975a, p. 121) added: “Unless evolution took the talus through a stage where it was much like man (as at East Rudolf), then through a stage where it was uniquely different from man (as at Olduvai and possibly Kromdraai), and back again to a stage like man (modern man), then australopithecine fossils had to have been unrelated to any direct human line.”
Of course, if the KNM-ER 813 talus really did belong to a creature very much like modern human beings, it fits, like the ER 1481 and ER 1472 femurs, into a continuum of such finds reaching back millions of years. In this case, any talk of an evolving human line, to which hominid fossils different from those of modern humans may be related, directly or indirectly, becomes irrelevant.
11.6.5 The Age of The KBS Tuff
The KBS Tuff was named after Kay Behrensmeyer, the Yale geologist who first identified it. Such volcanic