From Atlantis to the Sphinx (28 page)

At least,
Zinjanthropus
restored Leakey’s standing among palaeontologists; it looked as if he had repented his earlier heresies. One year later, his son Jonathan found another skull in bed 1, below
Zinjanthropus
. This had a larger brain than
Zinjanthropus
—680 cc compared to 530—but was still smaller than
Homo erectus
skulls (at around 800). A nearby hand and foot found by Louis and Mary Leakey were undeniably human. Tools found in the area also indicated that this was a human ancestor. At Dart’s suggestion, Leakey called it
Homo habilis
, tool-making man.

Leakey was rather pleased with himself. Before
Homo habilis
, palaeo-anthropologists had assumed that
Homo erectus
was the direct descendant of
Australopithecus
. Now Leakey had shown that a more truly human ancestor interposed between the two. Admittedly, this was something of a climb-down after his earlier belief that
Homo sapiens
might be found in the early Pleistocene. But it was better than nothing. In fact, Leakey still showed traces of the old heretic when he remarked that he felt that
Australopithecus
showed various specialised developments that did not lead towards man.

But there were many stone tools found at Pleistocene sites that left no doubt that
some
early man was a tool maker. Yet such tools were never found in association with
Australopithecus
remains.

By now—the late 1960s—Louis Leakey’s son Richard and his wife Meave had joined the search for human origins. In August 1972, one of Richard Leakey’s team found a shattered skull at Lake Turkana. Reconstructed by Meave Leakey, it looked much more human than
Australopithecus
, with a domed forehead and a brain capacity of over 800 cc. Leakey estimated that it was about 2.9 million years old. He decided that it was another specimen of
Homo habilis
. But if it
was
that old, then it was a contemporary of
Australopithecus
, and that meant that
Australopithecus
might not after all be a human ancestor. Leakey suggested that
Australopithecus
had vanished from prehistory like the Neanderthals.

J. D. Birdsell, the author of a book called
Human Evolution
, was inclined to date Richard Leakey’s
Homo habilis
at about two million years ago. But he was troubled about Leakey’s assertion that
Homo habilis
led to
Homo erectus.
It seemed to Birdsell that
Homo habilis
was more anatomically ‘modern’ than
Homo erectus
, and that development from
Homo habilis
to
Homo erectus
would be a retrogressive step. He was inclined to agree with Richard’s father Louis Leakey that probably
Homo erectus
was not a main part of the human line.

Interesting evidence for a more ‘human’ ancestor continued to turn up. Leakey was summoned by a colleague named John Harris to look at a human-like femur (thigh-bone) found among elephant bones in deposits older than 2.6 million years. More missing parts were found on further search. Again, they were unlike those of
Australopithecus
, and more like those of modern man. Leakey felt that they demonstrated that this creature—
Homo habilis
—walked upright all the time, while
Australopithecus
walked upright only some of the time. When a technique called potassium-argon dating seemed to show that the layer of material—known as tuff—in which the bones were found was 2.9 million years old, it certainly looked as if this
Homo habilis
was the oldest human specimen ever found.

But there was to be yet another twist to the story.

In 1973, a young anthropologist from the University of Chicago, Donald Johanson, was at a conference in Nairobi, where he met Richard Leakey. He mentioned to Leakey that a French geologist had told him of a promising site at Hadar, in the Afar desert of north-eastern Ethiopia, and that he was now on his way there to search for hominid fossils. When Leakey asked if he really expected to find hominids, Johanson replied: ‘Yes, older than yours.’ They bet a bottle of wine on it.

In fact, things went badly during the first season. Johanson failed to find fossils, and his grant was running out. But one afternoon, he found a tibia—the bone of the lower leg. A further search uncovered the knee joint and part of the upper bone. The deposits in which they were found was over three million years old. In his paper reporting the find, Johanson suggested that it could be four million years old, and gave his reasons for thinking it was humanoid. His discovery brought him another $25,000 in grants.

On 30 November 1974, Johanson and his colleague Tom Gray were searching another Hadar site, and as the temperature reached 103, were preparing to quit. But Johanson had been ‘feeling lucky’ all day, and insisted on looking in a gulley that had already been searched. There he saw a piece of arm bone that looked like a monkey. Gray went on to find a fragment of skull and a part of a femur. When they found other parts of a skeleton, they went into a kind of wild war dance of triumph. Later, as they were celebrating back at camp, and playing a Beatles record called ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, they decided to call their find (whose small size suggested a female) Lucy. Potassium-argon dating and magnetic dating methods showed Lucy to be about 3.5 million years old.

In the following year, on a hillside in Hadar, Johanson and his team found bones of no less than thirteen hominids, which they labelled ‘the First Family’. All proved to be of about the same age as Lucy. They also found stone tools of better workmanship than those of the Olduvai Gorge. When John Harris objected that these tools, found on the surface, might be modern, Johanson undertook more excavations and uncovered stone tools
in situ
, with an approximate age of 2.5 million years.

So it looked as if Lucy and the First Family were undoubtedly human, and, moreover, earlier than Leakey’s
Homo habilis
. At this point, Johanson was inclined to believe that Lucy was an
Australopithecus
, while the First Family was a type of
Homo habilis
. Richard Leakey thought that Lucy was probably a ‘late Ramapithecus’—the early ape that is quite probably not a human ancestor. But Johanson was later persuaded by a palaeontologist named Timothy White that the finds were all a type of
Australopithecus
. At this point, Johanson decided to call the Hadar group
Australopithecus afarensis
(after the Afar desert).

This, then, would seem to be the conclusion finally reached by the science of ancient man. Human beings have evolved over the course of three and a half million years, beginning with the ape-like
Australopithecus afarensis
. A million years later, this had evolved into
Australopithecus africanus
—‘Dartian man’. Then came
Homo habilis
,
Homo erectus
, and finally,
Homo sapiens
. The scheme certainly seems satisfyingly tidy and complete.

Yet doubts persist.
Australopithecus
was not known to be a tool maker, yet tools were found at ‘the First Family’ site. Could it be, after all, that the First Family were a group of
Homo habilis
, and that
Homo habilis
co-existed with
Australopithecus
?

Another find strengthens the doubt. In 1979, Mary Leakey was at Laetoli, twenty miles south of the Olduvai Gorge. And among fossil footprints of animals set in volcanic ash, her son Philip, and another expedition member, Peter Jones, discovered some hominid footprints, dating (according to potassium-argon dating) to about 3.6 to 3.8 million years ago. Yet they looked typically human, with a ‘raised arch, rounded heel, pronounced ball and forward pointing big toe necessary for walking erect’.

It would seem that, after nearly 300 years, the problem of Scheuchzer’s ‘old sinner’ is in some ways as obscure as ever.

And what difference does it make whether man is two million years old, or ten, or even more?

None whatsoever, if we can accept that
Australopithecus afarensis
could have developed into
Homo sapiens
in about three and a half million years.

For this is the problem: time scale.

Sir Arthur Keith wrote about the Taung skull that it ‘is much too late in the scale of time to have any part in man’s ancestry’. At that point, it was assumed that the Taung skull was about a million years old, and Keith felt that there was simply not time for such an ape-like creature to turn into
Homo sapiens
in 900,000 years.

But even if we suppose that Lucy was a much earlier form of human being, the problem remains. In the two million or so years between Lucy and ‘Dart’s baby’, there has been very little change—both might well be apes.
Homo erectus
, half a million years old, still seems apelike. Then, in a mere 400,000 years—a blink of the eyelid in geological time—we have
Homo sapiens
, and Neanderthals with a brain far larger than modern man.

If, on the other hand, Reck and Leakey are right, then
Homo sapiens
may have been around far longer than two million years, and the time scale becomes altogether more believable. Mary Leakey wrote about the Laetoli footprint: ‘...at least 3,600,000 years ago, in Pliocene times, what I believe to be man’s direct ancestor walked fully upright with a bipedal, free-striding gait... the form of his foot exactly the same as ours.’ And since it is the form of the foot that counts in human evolution—how recently the creature descended from the trees—this is of central importance.

If a hominid with a human foot existed more than three million years ago, it would certainly add useful support to the argument of this book—that civilisation is thousands of years older than historians believe. At first sight that statement may sound absurd—what difference can a few thousand years make, when we are speaking in millions? But what is really at issue here is the development of the human
mind
. In
Time-scale
, Nigel Calder quotes the anthropologist T. Wynn to the effect that tests devised by the psychologist Jean Piaget, carried out on Stone Age tools from Isimila, Tanzania—whose uranium dating shows them to be 330,000 years old—
indicate that the makers were as intelligent as modern humans.
¹

This is as startling in its way as Mary Leakey’s comment that upright creatures were walking around 3,600,000 years ago. It strikes us as somehow unreasonable. If there were intelligent creatures walking around 330,000 years ago, why did they not
do
something with their intelligence—invent the bow and arrow, or paint pictures? In fact, the question is unreasonable. Invention tends to be the outcome of challenges. Without challenges, things are inclined to go on much as they did yesterday and the day before. Small groups of hominids, living in widely separated environments, were in the same position as people living in remote villages a few centuries ago. They must have been incredibly parochial; each generation did exactly what its father and grandfathers and great-grandfathers did, because no one had any new ideas. Think of one of those Russian villages in nineteenth-century Russian novels, then multiply the boredom and narrow-mindedness by ten, and you begin to see how man could have remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years.

In other words, highly intelligent men may have gone on making the same kind of crude tools simply because they could see no reason to do anything else. It is true that walking upright confers certain advantages—a man can see further than an ape or a dog, and the fact that his eyes are set side by side, instead of on either side of his head, means that he is a better judge of distance, which is an advantage in hunting. But there is no good reason why an upright creature should not remain unchanged for a million years if no new challenges present themselves.

And what about the obvious objection—that if there
were
‘human’ ancestors walking the earth three or four million years ago, why have we not found their remains? The answer lies in Richard Leakey’s comment (in
People of the Lake):
‘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) ... he would need only a couple of large trestle tables on which to spread them out.’ Of the millions of hominids who lived on earth in prehistory, we merely have a few bones.

Yet even as it is, the trestle tables would contain some interesting evidence—like Reck’s skeleton and Leakey’s Kanam jaw—that seem to suggest that man may have been around rather longer than we suppose.

In 1976, a young American student of political science named Michael A. Cremo became a member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute in Florida, which teaches a form of Hinduism called Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Cremo’s guru, known as Swami Prabhupada, suggested to him that he should study paleoanthropology, with a view to trying to establish that
Homo sapiens
may be millions of years older than is generally accepted. (Prabhupada died in the following year, 1977.)

The thought of a scientific investigation being initiated for religious reasons arouses understandable misgivings—memories of the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ in Tennessee, and of modern born-again Christians who still oppose Darwinism. Yet it would be a mistake to bracket the outlook of Hinduism with that of some of the more dogmatic forms of Christianity, for Hinduism is remarkably free from dogmas. Its most fundamental belief is expressed in the Sanskrit phrase
Tat tvam asi
, ‘That thou art’—that the essence of the individual soul (Atman) is identical with the essence of God (Brahman). In Christianity, the statement ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ is generally taken to mean the same thing.