Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

9.2.11 Stone Tools at Xihoudu (Early Early Pleistocene)

In 1960, Jia Lanpo investigated Early Pleistocene sand and gravel deposits at Xihoudu in northern Shanxi province. He found 3 stones with signs of percussion, and more artifacts turned up in 1961 and 1962. Jia (1980, pp. 10–11) said: “In processing the stone artefacts collected at Xihoudu, we took extra care against the possibility of misjudgement by carefully analysing the scars on the stones to see if they were caused by natural, physical, or biological factors. But none could explain them. Later, we asked the late well-known geologist Li Siguang (also known as J. S. Lee) to examine the specimens from the angle of geomechanics to see if they could have been caused by natural agencies. His answer was: ‘Unlikely. Shaped by man would be more appropriate.’” Because of Early Pleistocene faunal remains, the site was dated over a million years old. According to Jia (1985, p. 139), “Preliminary palaeomagnetic data indicate an absolute age for the Xihoudu site of about 1.8 million years b.p.”

Among the dozens of stone tools were cores, flakes, choppers, scrapers, and heavy triangular points. Jia (1980, p. 11) wrote: “The choppers are single or double faced, and bear marks resulting from use. . . . a fragmented deer skull with both antler stumps attached was unearthed here, and on one stump transverse cuts could be observed. The cuts were most likely made by a sharp tool instead of being caused by erosion or other natural forces. Another antler bears marks of being scraped. These mark-bearing antlers lead us to believe . . . that over a million years ago, hominids at Xihoudu were using antler and bone tools.”

Jia also found what appeared to be charred bones. This was established by visual comparison with burned bones from Zhoukoudian and by laboratory testing. But Jia (1980, p. 12) admitted: “Who the creators of the Xihoudu culture were has not yet been identified, for no human fossils have been found, not even so much as a tooth. From the antiquity of the site we may infer that the genus probably belongs to the Australopithecinae.”

Aigner (1981, pp. 183–184), as one might well imagine, disagreed: “Despite the strong support for Lower Pleistocene human activity in north China claimed for Hsihoutu [Xihoudu], I am reluctant to accept unequivocally the materials at this time. . . . if Hsihoutu is verified, then humans occupied the north of China some 1,000,000 years ago and utilized fire. This would call into question some of our current assumptions about both the course of human evolution and the adaptational capabilities of early hominids.”

If one could, however, become detached from current assumptions, interesting possibilities open up. Considering all the evidence gathered around the world over the past century or so, and not just the carefully selected evidence used to support present evolutionary views of human origins, one may infer something different than did Jia regarding Xihoudu. It is possible that some other hominid, perhaps Homo sapiens, might have been responsible for the cultural remains at Xihoudu. In fact, Homo sapiens is a more likely explanation for the presence of stone tools, bone tools, and fire than an australopithecine.

9.2.12 Concluding Words on China

This ends our review of finds in China. It appears that age determinations of fossil hominids have been distorted by morphological dating. When these ages are adjusted to reflect reasonable faunal date ranges, the total evidence fails to exclusively support an evolutionary hypothesis. Rather, the evidence appears also consistent with the proposal that anatomically modern human beings have coexisted with a variety of humanlike creatures throughout the Pleistocene.

Living Ape-Men?

In examining the fossil hominids of China (Chapter 9), we found signs that humans may have coexisted with more apelike hominids throughout the Pleistocene. In this chapter, we suggest that humans and ape-man-like creatures continue to coexist.

Over the past hundred or so years, researchers have accumulated substantial evidence that creatures resembling Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and the australopithecines even now roam wilderness areas of the world.

The existence of living ape-men, if admitted by scientists, offers new ways to interpret ambiguous paleoanthropological evidence. Hominid fossils once thought to be from the Middle Pleistocene or older periods may in fact be quite recent. The existence of living ape-men also calls into question the reliability of the scientific information processing system in zoology and anthropology.

10.1 Hard Evidence Is Hard To Find

In 1775, Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the modern system of biological classification, listed three existing human species: Homo sapiens, Homo troglodytes (cave man), and Homo ferus (wild man). Although Linnaeus knew the latter two species only from travelers’ reports and other secondary sources of information, he still included them within his Systema Naturae (Shackley 1983, p. 10).

Since 1775, much more evidence for the existence of living apelike wildmen has come to light. Professional scientists have (1) observed wildmen in natural surroundings, (2) observed live captured specimens, (3) observed dead specimens, and (4) collected physical evidence for wildmen, including hundreds of footprints. They have also interviewed nonscientist informants and investigated the vast amount of wildman lore contained in ancient literatures and traditions.

Despite this, no zoo or museum in a civilized nation has in its collection a wildman specimen, alive or dead. Many will say that all the wildman evidence mentioned above exists simply in reports, and that reports alone, even those given by scientists, are not sufficient to establish the existence of wildmen. Hard evidence, available now, to anyone who wants to see it and touch it, is required.

But what is the real status of hard evidence? Can a physical object in and of itself confirm a certain idea about some aspect of human origins? The answer to that question is no. In paleoanthropology, as in many areas of science, evidence exists primarily in the form of reports.

The most important feature of an artifact or a fossil hominid bone, as far as paleoanthropologists are concerned, is its age. As we show in Appendix 1, radiometric and chemical methods are not very reliable age indicators. Therefore the best age indicator is stratigraphic position. Once a bone or artifact is taken out of the ground, evidence of its original stratigraphic position lies principally in the reports of its discovery.

For example, one afternoon in the early 1970s, Donald Johanson, the discoverer of “Lucy” (the most famous specimen of Australopithecus afarensis), found some fossilized bones lying on the surface, near his base camp in the Afar region of Ethiopia. At the very moment his fingers grasped one of those bones, lying upon Pliocene sediments, Johanson was, one might say, in touch with some hard evidence. But Johanson’s discovery of those bones had no real scientific meaning until it was reported to other scientists. And from that time on, the discovery has existed, as far as the world of science is concerned, only in reports.

Were the bones discovered in the exact manner described in the reports? The answer to that question depends upon how much faith one places in the reporter and the reporting process.

One might take some comfort in the fact that the “actual” bones—the real hard evidence—are still present in a museum in Ethiopia. Of course, it is not so easy to obtain direct access to rare fossil specimens. But say you did have the proper scientific credentials and were able to go to Ethiopia and inspect the actual bones of Lucy. How would you know for certain that those were the bones picked up years ago by Johanson? You might compare them with the photographs and descriptions in the published reports. But here we go again—everything depends upon how much faith one places in the reports.

In some cases, the bones themselves are not available for inspection. For example, during World War II almost the whole collection of Beijing man (Homo erectus) fossils was lost during the Japanese occupation of China. The Beijing man fossils now exist only in the form of old written reports, photographs, and casts. And no one doubts that the originals did in fact exist.

But what about reports by scientists who claim they saw and examined dead specimens of wildmen, the corpses of which were not preserved? Most scientists will grant no credibility at all to such reports.

Here and in the case of Beijing man, the actual physical evidence is no longer available for inspection. Yet in one case the reports are believed, and in the other they are not. Why? We propose that reports about evidence conforming to the standard view of human evolution generally receive greater credibility than reports about nonconforming evidence. Thus deeply held beliefs, rather than purely objective standards, may become the determining factor in the acceptance and rejection of reports about controversial evidence.

10.2 Cryptozoology

For some researchers, the study of creatures such as wildmen comes under the heading of a genuine branch of science called cryptozoology. Cryptozoology, a term coined by the French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, refers to the scientific investigation of species whose existence has been reported but not fully documented. The Greek word kryptos means “hidden,” so cryptozoology literally means “the study of hidden animals.” There exists an International Society of Cryptozoology, the board of directors of which includes professional biologists, zoologists, and paleontologists from universities and museums around the world. The purpose of the society, as stated in its journal Cryptozoology, is “the investigation, analysis, publication, and discussion of all matters related to animals of unexpected form or size, or unexpected occurrence in time or space.” A typical issue of Cryptozoology usually contains one or more articles by scientists on the topic of wildmen.

Is it really possible that there could be an unknown species of hominid on this planet? Many will find this hard to believe for two reasons. They suppose that every inch of the earth has been quite thoroughly explored. And they also suppose that scientists possess a complete inventory of the earth’s living animal species. Both suppositions are incorrect.

First, even in countries such as the United States, there remain vast unpopulated and little-traveled areas. In particular, the northwestern United States still has large regions of densely forested, mountainous terrain which, although mapped from the air, are rarely penetrated by humans on the ground.

Second, a surprising number of new species of animals are still being found each year—about 5,000 according to a conservative estimate (Heuvelmans 1983, pp. 19–20). As might be suspected, the great majority of these, some 4,000, are insects. Yet Heuvelmans (1983, p. 21) noted: “Quite recently, in the mid 1970’s, there were discovered each year, around 112 new species of fish, 18 new species of reptiles, about ten new species of amphibians, the same number of mammals, and 3 or 4 new species of birds.”

Most of the mammals were small, and this might lead one to doubt that a large mammal, such as a wildman, might someday enter the list of living species. But the twentieth century has seen the discovery of many large species, some “known from native reports which were initially disbelieved” (Shackley 1983, p. 166).

The largest of the bears, the Kodiak bear, was unknown to science until 1899. The largest rhinoceros, Cotton’s white rhino, was discovered in 1900. The mountain gorilla, the largest member of the ape family, turned up in 1901. The largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, was first captured in 1912. In 1975, the largest known peccary, or wild hog, Catagonus wagneri, was discovered in Paraguay. This animal was previously known only by Pleistocene fossils (Wetzel et al. 1975; Heuvelmans 1983, p. 12). In 1976, a large and entirely new species of shark, 4.5 meters (almost 15 feet) long and weighing over 700 kilograms (over 1,500 pounds), was caught by a U.S. Navy ship in the ocean waters off Hawaii (L. Taylor et al. 1983). So it is not completely outside the realm of possibility that science might someday come to fully accept the existence of wildmen, which may prove to be previously unknown types of hominids or primates, or surviving representatives of fossil hominids such as the australopithecines, Homo erectus, or the Neanderthals. It would not be the first time that science has found examples of “living fossils.”

10.3 European Wildmen

Many art objects of the Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, and Etruscans bear images of semi-human creatures resembling wildmen. For example, in the Museum of Prehistory in Rome, there is an Etruscan silver bowl on which may be seen, among human hunters on horses, the figure of a large, ape-man-like creature (Wendt 1972, p. 15). Such imagery is, of course, subject to varying interpretations. The Russian scientist Boris Porshnev believed the humanlike creatures represented survivals of prehuman hominids. But British anthropologist Myra Shackley, who said wildmen may in fact exist in some parts of the world, asserted that the figures on classical Graeco-Roman art objects represent purely mythological beings such as satyrs (1983, pp. 18–19).

The satyr is a stylized and very recognizable figure, part human and part animal, occurring mainly on Greek vases. Typically, satyrs have horselike tails and are shown engaged in some kind of sporting or licentious behavior, perhaps connected with the cult of Dionysus. The hairy humanlike figure depicted on the Etruscan silver bowl, however, is shown not with revelers but in the midst of a hunting party of well-armed humans mounted on horses. The creature has no satyr’s tail and appears to be carrying a crude club in one hand and a large stone, raised threateningly above his head, in the other.

During the Middle Ages, wildmen continued to be depicted in European art and architecture. A page from Queen Mary’s Psalter, composed in the fourteenth century, shows a very realistically depicted hairy wildman being attacked by a pack of dogs (Shackley 1983, p. 25). Wildmen were thought to live in caves and forests, where they subsisted on berries and roots. They were not considered ordinary humans. Instead, they were said to be members of the animal kingdom, unable to speak or comprehend the existence of God.

10.4 Northwestern North America

For centuries, the Indians of the northwestern United States and western Canada have believed in the reality of wildmen, known by various names, the most familiar of these being Sasquatch. In 1792, the Spanish botanist-naturalist José Mariano Moziño, in describing the Indians of Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, Canada, stated (1970, pp. 27–28): “I do not know what to say about Matlox, inhabitant of the mountainous district, of whom all have an unbelievable terror. They imagine his body as very monstrous, all covered with stiff black bristles; a head similar to a human one, but with much greater, sharper and stronger fangs than those of the bear; extremely long arms; and toes and fingers armed with long curved claws. His shouts alone (they say) force those who hear them to the ground, and any unfortunate body he slaps is broken into a thousand pieces.”

In 1784, the London Times printed a report that Indians at Lake of the Woods, Manitoba, had captured a “huge, manlike, hair-covered” creature (Shackley 1983, p. 35).

Describing the Spokane Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Elkanah Walker, a missionary who lived among them for 9 years, wrote in 1840: “They believe in the existence of a race of giants which inhabit a certain mountain, off to the west of us. This mountain is covered with perpetual snow. They inhabit its top. . . . They hunt and do all their work in the night. They are men stealers. They come to people’s lodges in the night, when the people are asleep and take them and put them under their skins and take them to their place of abode without their even awakening. . . . They say their track is about a foot and a half long. . . . They frequently come in the night and steal their salmon from their nets and eat them raw. If the people are awake they always know when they are coming very near by the smell which is most intolerable” (Drury 1976, pp. 122–123).

Indians from the Columbia River region of the northwestern United States produced rock carvings that resembled the heads of apes. Anthropologist Grover Krantz (1982, p. 97) showed photographs of the heads to a number of scientists and noted: “Zoologists who did not know their source unanimously declared them to be representative of nonhuman, higher primates; those who knew the source insisted they must be something else!” Whatever the carvings may actually represent, Krantz’s findings are significant. Preconceptions seem to determine what scientists are prepared to see, and one thing most scientists are definitely not prepared to see is apelike creatures in the American Northwest.

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt included an intriguing wildman report in his book The Wilderness Hunter (1906, pp. 255 –261). The incident took place in the Bitterroot Mountains, between Idaho and Montana. Wildman reports still come out of this region.

In the early to middle 1800s, a trapper named Bauman and his partner were exploring a particularly wild and lonely pass, through which ran a stream said to have many beaver. The two trappers set up camp late one afternoon and went out to explore for a couple of hours. Returning at dusk, they found that something had scattered their belongings around and had in “sheer wantonness” destroyed their lean-to. They rebuilt their lean-to, made supper, and then studied the footprints left by the beast. They noticed, quite to their surprise, that the malicious intruder had apparently walked off on two feet (bears usually go on all fours). This was a bit unsettling, but at last they managed to fall asleep under the lean-to.

Around midnight, they were awakened by some noise and saw a huge body standing at the opening of the lean-to. Their nostrils were assailed by a “strong wild-beast odor.” Bauman fired a couple of shots at the creature. They figured he did not hit it, because they heard it move away through the woods.

The next day, the creature again ravaged the camp while Bauman and his partner were checking their traps. They found a trail of prints in the soft dirt, and these confirmed once more that their assailant, unlike a bear, had walked off on just two feet. That evening, they set up a roaring fire, which they kept going all night. Around midnight, the creature was heard moving through the woods, and it several times “uttered a harsh grating, long-drawn moan.”

The following morning, Bauman and his partner decided to leave, but first they wanted to check their traps. As they moved through the forest, they sensed they were being followed. Roosevelt (1906, p. 259) said, “In the high, bright sunlight their fears seemed absurd to the two armed men, accustomed as they were, through long years of lonely wandering in the wilderness, to face every kind of danger from man, brute, or element.” Bauman’s partner returned to the camp before he did. When Bauman finally arrived, he found his partner dead. Said Roosevelt (1906, p. 260): “The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soft soil, told the whole story.”

Roosevelt had some thoughts about the episode. He wrote of Bauman: “he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides he knew well the stories told by Indian medicine men in their winter camps, of the snow-walkers, and the spectres, and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man can say” (Roosevelt 1906, pp. 254 – 255).

Roosevelt’s psychological explanation of Bauman’s tale is typical of the reasoning presently applied by those who have no desire to add wildmen to the North American faunal list. In this case, because of the vagueness of the account, it is not easy to offer counterarguments. Bauman did not get a clear look at the creature. But one might wonder what known large North America mammal typically prowls about on two feet rather than four? Bears will stand for a short time on two legs, but are not known to move any great distance in bipedal fashion. If the creature really was a bear, Bauman, an experienced backwoodsman, should have been able to identify it as such from the footprints, which he closely inspected. But he did not. What sort of animal could have made the footprints? Roosevelt (1906, p. 261) said that Bauman believed “the creature with which he had to deal was something either half-human or half devil, some great goblin-beast.”

Taken on its own, the Bauman story is not very impressive as evidence for the existence of wildmen in North America, but when considered along with the more substantive reports it acquires greater significance.

On July 4, 1884, the Colonist, a newspaper published in Victoria, British Columbia, carried a story titled: “What is it? A strange creature captured above Yale. A British Columbian Gorilla.” According to the article, Ned Austin, a railway engineer, spotted a humanlike creature ahead of him on the tracks, blew the whistle, and stopped. The creature darted up the side of a hill, with several railway employees in pursuit. After capturing the animal, described as “half man and half beast” (Shackley 1983, p. 35), the railway employees turned him over to Mr. George Tilbury.

The Colonist reported: “‘Jacko,’ as the creature has been called by his capturers, is something of the gorilla type, standing about four feet seven inches in height and weighing 127 pounds. He has long, black, strong hair and resembles a human being with one exception, his entire body, excepting his hands (or paws) and feet is covered with glossy hair about one inch long. His forearm is much longer than a man’s forearm, and he possesses extraordinary strength” (Shackley 1983, p. 35).

The paper added (Shackley 1983, p. 36): “Mr. Thos. White and Mr. Gouin, C.E., as well as Mr. Major, who kept a small store about half a mile west of the tunnel during the past two years, have mentioned seeing a curious creature at different points between Camps 13 and 17, but no attention was paid to their remarks as people came to the conclusion that they had seen either a bear or a stray Indian dog. Who can unravel the mystery that surrounds Jacko? Does he belong to a species hitherto unknown in this part of the continent?”

That the creature was not a gorilla seems clear—its weight was too small. Some might suppose that Jacko was a chimpanzee. But this idea was apparently considered and rejected by persons who were familiar with Jacko. Sanderson (1961, p. 27) mentioned “a comment made in another paper shortly after the original story was published, and which asked . . . how anybody could suggest that this ‘Jacko’ could have been a chimpanzee that had escaped from a circus.” Was the whole story perhaps a hoax? Myra Shackley thought not. She

noted: “The newspaper account of Jacko was subsequently confirmed by an old man, August Castle, who was a child in the town at the time. The fate of the captive is not known, although some said that he (accompanied by Mr. Tilbury) was shipped east by rail in a cage on the way to be exhibited in a sideshow, but died in transit” (Shackley 1983, p. 36).

Furthermore, there were additional reports of creatures like Jacko from the same region. Zoologist Ivan Sanderson (1961, p. 29) said about Jacko in one of his collections of wildman evidence: “one of his species had been reported from the same area by Mr. Alexander Caulfield Anderson, a well-known explorer and an executive of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who was doing a ‘survey’ of the newly opened territory and seeking a feasible trade route through it for his company. He reported just such hairy humanoids as having hurled rocks down upon him and his surveying party from more than one slope. That was in 1864.”

In 1901, Mike King, a well-known lumberman, was working in an isolated region in northern Vancouver Island. He had to work alone. His native American employees refused to accompany him, fearing that the dreaded wildman of the woods lived there. Once, as King came over a ridge, he spotted a large humanlike creature covered with reddish brown fur. On the bank of a creek, the creature was washing some roots and placing them in two orderly piles beside him. The creature then left, running like a human being. King said: “His arms were peculiarly long and used freely in climbing and bush-running.” Footprints observed by King were distinctly human, except for the “phenomenally long and spreading toes” (Sanderson 1961, pp. 34–35).

In 1941, several members of the Chapman family encountered a wildman at Ruby Creek, British Columbia. In 1959, Ivan Sanderson interviewed the Chapmans, who were native Americans, about what happened. On a sunny summer afternoon, Mrs. Chapman’s oldest son alerted her to the presence of a large animal coming down out of the woods near their home. At first, she thought it was a large bear. But then, much to her horror, she saw that it was a gigantic man covered all over with yellow-brown hair. The hair was about 4 inches long. The creature moved directly towards the house, and Mrs. Chapman rounded up her three children and fled downstream to the village.

She estimated that the creature was about 7.5 feet tall. It had a relatively small head and a short, thick neck—practically no neck at all. Its body was completely human in shape, except the chest was immensely thick and the arms unusually long. Its shoulders were extremely wide. The naked regions of its face and its hands were much darker than the hair and appeared to be nearly black.

When Mr. Chapman returned home, a couple of hours after his wife had fled, he saw huge humanlike footprints all around the house. He was greatly alarmed, because, like almost all the native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, he had heard from childhood about the “big wild men of the mountains” (Sanderson 1961, p. 68). For the next week, giant humanlike footprints were found every day.

Moreover, said Sanderson, the Chapmans described the “strange gurgling whistle” emitted by the creature. According to Sanderson, this cry seemed identical to that heard by other persons in connection with similar creatures elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

In October of 1955, Mr. William Roe, who had spent much of his life hunting wild animals and observing their habits, encountered a wildman (Green 1978, pp. 53–56). The incident took place near a little town called Tete Jaune Cache in British Columbia. One day, said Roe in a sworn statement, he climbed up Mica Mountain to an old deserted mine and saw, at a distance of about 75 yards, what he first took to be a bear. When the creature stepped out into a clearing, Roe realized that it was something different: “My first impression was of a huge man, about six feet tall, almost three feet wide, and probably weighing somewhere near three hundred pounds. It was covered from head to foot with dark brown silver-tipped hair. But as it came closer I saw by its breasts that it was female. And yet, its torso was not curved like a female’s. Its broad frame was straight from shoulder to hip. Its arms were much thicker than a man’s arms, and longer, reaching almost to its knees. Its feet were broader proportionately than a man’s, about five inches wide at the front and tapering to much thinner heels. When it walked it placed the heel of its foot down first, and I could see the grey-brown skin or hide on the soles of its feet” (Green 1978, pp. 53–55).

“It came to the edge of the bush I was hiding in, within twenty feet of me, and squatted down on its haunches,” said Roe. “Reaching out its hands it pulled the branches of bushes toward it and stripped the leaves with its teeth. Its lips curled flexibly around the leaves as it ate. I was close enough to see that its teeth were white and even. . . . The head was higher at the back than at the front. The nose was broad and flat. The lips and chin protruded farther than its nose. But the hair that covered it, leaving bare only the parts of its face around the mouth, nose and ears, made it resemble an animal as much as a human. None of this hair, even on the back of its head, was longer than an inch, and that on its face was much shorter. Its ears were shaped like a human’s ears. But its eyes were small and black like a bear’s. And its neck also was unhuman. Thicker and shorter than any man’s I had ever seen.”

After a few minutes the creature became aware of Roe’s presence in the bushes and departed. It was not exactly afraid but was apparently unwilling to have contact with a human being (Green 1978, p. 55).

In 1967, in the Bluff Creek region of Northern California, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin managed to shoot a short color film of a female Sasquatch. They also made casts of her footprints. These prints, which were 14 inches long, were 5.5 inches wide at the ball and 4 inches wide at the heel (Green 1978, p. 118).

Several opinions have been expressed about the film. While some authorities have said it is an outright fake, others have said they think it provides good evidence in favor of the reality of the Sasquatch. Mixed opinions have also been put forward. Dr. D. W. Grieve, an anatomist specializing in human walking, studied the film and had this to say: “My subjective impressions have oscillated between total acceptance of the Sasquatch on the grounds that the film would be difficult to fake, to one of irrational rejection based on an emotional response to the possibility that the Sasquatch actually exists. This seems worth stating because others have reacted similarly to the film. The possibility of a very clever fake cannot be ruled out on the evidence of the film. A man could have sufficient height and suitable proportions to mimic the longitudinal dimensions of the Sasquatch. The shoulder breadth however would be difficult to achieve without giving an unnatural appearance to the arm swing and shoulder contours” (Napier 1973, p. 220).

From his study of the film, Grieve estimated the length of the Sasquatch’s foot to be 13.3 inches, which is consistent with the length of 14 inches reported for the footprints. John R. Napier (1973), however, believed that a 14-inch foot length was not consistent with the estimated body height of 6 feet 5 inches. In his computations, Napier, a respected British anatomist, used the ratio of foot length to body height in modern humans. He did not, however, explain why the physical proportions of the Sasquatch must be the same as those of modern humans.

Anthropologist Myra Shackley of the University of Leicester observed (1983, p. 43) that the majority view seems to be “that the film could be a hoax, but if so an incredibly clever one.” Reacting similarly, Napier (1973, p. 95) stated: “Perhaps it was a man dressed up in a monkey-skin; if so it was a brilliantly executed hoax and the unknown perpetrator will take his place with the great hoaxers of the world.” But then he added: “Perhaps it was the first film of a new type of hominid, quite unknown to science” (Napier 1973, p. 95). Concerning the charge of incredibly clever hoaxing, this explanation could be used to dismiss almost any kind of scientific evidence whatsoever. All one has to do is posit a sufficiently expert hoaxer. Therefore the hoax hypothesis should be applied only when there is actual evidence of hoaxing, as at Piltdown, for example. Ideally, one should be able to produce the hoaxer. Futhermore, even a demonstrated case of hoaxing cannot be used to dismiss entire categories of similar evidence.

10.5 More Footprints

As far as Sasquatch footprints are concerned, independent witnesses have examined and reported hundreds of sets, and of these more than 100 have been preserved in photographs and casts (Green 1978, p. 348). Napier stated: “if any of them is real then as scientists we have a lot to explain. Among other things we shall have to re-write the story of human evolution . . . and we shall have to admit that there are still major mysteries to be solved in the world we thought we knew so well” (1973, p. 204).

Critics, however, assert that all these footprints have been faked. Undoubtedly, some footprints have been faked, a fact the staunchest supporters of the Sasquatch will readily admit. But could every single one of them be a hoax? Napier (1973, p. 124) stated that if all the prints are fakes “then we must be prepared to accept the existence of a conspiracy of Mafia-like ramifications with cells in practically every major township from San Francisco to Vancouver.”

Grover S. Krantz, an anthropologist at Washington State University, was initially skeptical of Sasquatch reports. In order to determine whether or not the creature really existed, Krantz studied in detail some prints found in 1970 in northeast Washington State. In reconstructing the skeletal structure of the foot from the print, he noted that the ankle was positioned more forward than in a human foot. Taking into consideration the reported height and weight of an adult Sasquatch, Krantz, using his knowledge of physical anthropology, calculated just how far forward the ankle would have to be set. Returning to the prints, he found that the position of the ankle exactly matched his theoretical calculations. “That’s when I decided the thing is real,” said Krantz. “There is no way a faker could have known how far forward to set that ankle. It took me a couple of months to work it out with the casts in hand, so you have to figure how much smarter a faker would’ve had to be” (Huyghe 1984, p. 94).

Krantz (1983) and wildman expert John Green (1978, pp. 349–356) have written extensive reports on the North American footprint evidence. Typically the prints are 14 to 18 inches long and 5 to 9 inches wide, giving a surface roughly 3 to 4 times larger than that of an average human foot. Hence the popular name Bigfoot. To make a Sasquatch footprint as deep as an average human footprint would require a weight 3 to 4 times greater than that of an average-sized man. In all cases, however, whether the prints are in snow, mud, dirt, or wet sand, the Sasquatch prints are much deeper than those made by a man walking right next to them in the same material. Thus a weight of more than 3 or 4 times that of a man is required to make the Sasquatch prints. Green, wearing large fake feet and carrying 250 pounds on his back (for a total of 450 pounds), was unable to make a deep enough impression in firm wet sand. Moreover, Green’s fake feet were only 14.5 inches long, small for a Sasquatch. Larger feet would have produced impressions of even smaller depth in the sand. Krantz (1983) estimated that to make typical Sasquatch prints a total weight of at least 700 pounds is required. Thus a 200-pound man would have to be carrying at least 500 pounds to make a good print.

But that is only the beginning. There are reports of series of prints extending from three-quarters of a mile up to several miles, in deserted regions far away from the nearest roads. The stride length of a Sasquatch varies from 4 to 6 feet (the stride length of an average man is about 3 feet). Try walking a mile with at least 500 pounds on your back and taking strides 5 feet long.

“A footprint machine, a kind of mechanical stamp, has been suggested,” stated Napier (1973, p. 125), “but an apparatus capable of delivering a thrust of approximately 800 lb per square foot that can be manhandled over rough and mountainous country puts a strain on one’s credulity.” In addition, said Napier (1973, p. 125), careful studies of Sasquatch prints by Dr. Maurice Tripp, a geologist, revealed that impact ridges, which a footprint machine would be expected to leave, were not present.

Some of the reported series of tracks were in fresh snow, enabling observers to verify that no other marks were made at the ground level by some machine paralleling the prints. In several cases, the Sasquatch footprints indicated the maker strode over large logs, which a human of normal size could not have gotten over without disturbing the fresh snow clearly visible on their tops. Sometimes the Sasquatch prints went up or down embankments. In some cases, the distance between the toes of the footprints varied from one print to the next in a single series of prints. This means that besides all the other problems facing a hoaxer, he would have had to incorporate moving parts into his artificial feet.

Furthermore, in order to insure that some of his fake prints would be found, any hoaxer would probably have had to make more trails of footprints than were actually discovered—and that means a lot of work.

What about a device operated from a hovering craft? Such a device would undoubtedly be very expensive. A helicopter alone is not a cheap item, and a custom device for making the footprints would also cost a bit. Also, footprints have been found at the same time that a Sasquatch was actually seen or soon thereafter, as, for example, in the Patterson sighting in 1967 and the Chapman sighting in 1941. In other cases, people sleeping at campsites or work sites have gotten up in the morning and found newly made footprints nearby. In one case, the footprints went right alongside a man’s camper truck (Green 1978, p. 352). If the prints had been made by a stamping machine, operated on the ground or from a helicopter, the people reporting the prints almost certainly would have been awakened.

In conclusion, critics have failed to explain all the footprints as the work of hoaxers. It would seem, therefore, that the footprints argue strongly for the reality of the Sasquatch, as demonstrated by the following case.

On June 10, 1982, Paul Freeman, a U.S. Forest Service patrolman tracking elk in the Walla Walla district of Washington State, observed a hairy biped around 8 feet tall, standing about 60 yards from him. After 30 seconds, the large animal walked away (Huyghe 1984, p. 94). Krantz (1983) studied casts of the creature’s footprints and found dermal ridges, sweat pores, and other features in the proper places for large primate feet. Detailed skin impressions on the side walls of the prints indicated the presence of a flexible sole pad.

Krantz solicited opinions from other scholars and fingerprint experts. Tatyana Gladkova, a specialist in dermatoglyphics from the USSR Institute of Anthropology, said: “I see dermal ridges of the arch type distally directed. I see sweat pores. If it’s a fake, it’s a brilliant fake, on the level of counterfeiting, and by someone well versed in dermatoglyphics” (Krantz 1983, p. 78).

Douglas M. Monsoor, a master police fingerprint examiner from Lakewood, Colorado, stated: “I see the presence of ridge structure in these casts, which, in my examination, appears consistent with that type of ridge structure you would find in a human. Under magnification, they evidence all the minute characteristics similar to human dermal ridges. . . . If hoaxing were involved, I can conceive of no way in which it could have been done. They appear to be casts of impressions of a primate foot—of a creature different from any of which I am aware” (Krantz 1983, p. 79).

Ten years earlier, John R. Napier (1973, p. 125) declared that he found the prints he himself studied “biologically convincing.” Napier (1973, pp. 204 –205) stated: “The evidence that I have examined persuades me that some of the tracks are real, and that they are manlike in form. . . . But when the size of the tracks is taken into account, and the conclusion is reached that the man-like creature in question has a stature of at least 8 ft. and weighs upward of 800 lb., the mind starts to boggle at such a preposterous idea. The vision of such creatures stomping barefoot through the forests of north-west America, unknown to science, is beyond common sense. Yet reason argues this is the case. . . . Thomas Huxley’s aphorism that ‘logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men’ puts steel into my soul. . . . I am convinced that the Sasquatch exists.” Coming from a scientist who headed the primate program at the Smithsonian Institution, this is a very strong statement. Napier is also one of Great Britain’s leading experts in the field of primate anatomy. His name will come up often in our discussion of hominid fossil discoveries in Africa.

In the face of much good evidence, why do almost all anthropologists and zoologists remain silent about Sasquatch? Krantz observed, “They are scared for their reputations and their jobs” (Huyghe 1984, p. 96). Napier similarly noted: “One of the problems, perhaps the greatest problem, in investigating Sasquatch sightings is the suspicion with which people who claim to have seen a Sasquatch are treated by their neighbours and employers. To admit such an experience is, in some areas, to risk personal reputation, social status and professional credibility” (1973, p. 88). In particular, he told of “the case of a highly qualified oil company geologist who told his story but insisted that his name should not be mentioned for fear of dismissal by his company” (Napier 1973, p. 88). In this regard, Roderick Sprague, an anthropologist from the University of Idaho, said of Krantz: “It is Krantz’s willingness to openly investigate the unknown that has cost him the respect of many colleagues as well as timely academic promotion” (1986, p. 103).

The majority of the Sasquatch reports come from the northwestern United States and British Columbia. However, there are also numerous reports from the eastern parts of the United States and Canada. For example, Green (1978) stated that there were, as of 1977, 11 reports from New York, more than 24 reports from Pennsylvania, 19 reports from Ohio, 18 from Michigan, 9 from Tennessee, more than 36 from New Jersey, 19 from Arkansas, 23 from Illinois, 30 from Texas, and 104 (maybe more) from Florida. Moving out west, Green recorded 74 reports from Montana, 32 from Idaho, 176 from Oregon, 281 from Washington, 225 from British Columbia, and 343 from California.

The volume of reports from the Pacific Northwest caused John R. Napier (1973, p. 96) to state: “The North American Bigfoot or Sasquatch has a lot going for it. It is impossible on the evidence . . . to say that it does not exist. Too many people claim to have seen it or at least to have seen footprints to dismiss its reality out of hand. To suggest that hundreds of people at worst are lying or, at best, deluding themselves is neither proper nor realistic.”

“One is forced to conclude,” said Napier, “that a man-like life-form of gigantic proportions is living at the present time in the wild areas of the northwestern United States and British Columbia. . . . That such a creature should be alive and kicking in our midst, unrecognized and unclassifiable, is a profound blow to the credibility of modern anthropology” (Green 1978, p. 12). It might also be said that the existence of living ape-men in North America, from Washington and Oregon to Florida and New Jersey, is a blow not only to anthropology, but to biology, zoology, and science in general.

10.6 Central And South America

Apelike wildmen are also reported in southern Mexico and throughout Central America. In White Indians of Darien, Richard Oglesby Marsh said a man told him that in 1920 he had killed a humanlike animal in Central America. In Buckskin Joe, Edward Jonathan Hoyt reported an encounter he had in 1898 in Honduras. A large, apelike creature, about 5 feet tall, crawled over the end of his bunk. Hoyt killed the animal, which resembled a human (Green 1978, p. 133).

From southern Mexico’s tropical forests come accounts of beings called the Sisimite. Wendell Skousen, a geologist, said the people of Cubulco in Baja Verapaz reported: “There live in the mountains very big, wild men, completely clothed in short, thick, brown, hairy fur, with no necks, small eyes, long arms and huge hands. They leave footprints twice the length of a man’s.” Several persons said that they had been chased down mountainsides by the Sisimite. Skousen thought the creatures, which were said to travel sometimes on two legs and sometimes on all four, may have been bears. However, upon questioning the natives carefully, he wrote: “it looked like a bear, but it wasn’t from the description that they gave—no conspicuous ears, no ‘snout’” (Sanderson 1961, p. 159). Similar creatures are reported in Guatemala, where, it has been said, they kidnap women and children (Sanderson 1961, pp. 161–162).

People in Belize (formerly British Honduras) speak of semi-human creatures called Dwendis, which inhabit the jungles in the southern part of their country. The name Dwendi comes from the Spanish word Duende, meaning “goblin.” Ivan Sanderson, who conducted research in Belize, wrote (1961, pp. 164 –165): “Dozens told me of having seen them, and these were mostly men of substance who had worked for responsible organizations like the Forestry Department and who had, in several cases, been schooled or trained either in Europe or the United States. One, a junior forestry officer born locally, described in great detail two of these little creatures that he had suddenly noticed quietly watching him on several occasions at the edge of the forestry reserve near the foot of the Maya Mountains. . . . These little folk were described as being between three foot six and four foot six, well proportioned but with very heavy shoulders and rather long arms, clothed in thick, tight, close brown hair looking like that of a short-coated dog; having very flat yellowish faces but head-hair no longer than the body hair except down the back of the neck and midback.” The Dwendis appear to represent a species different from the large Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest of North America.

Most of Sanderson’s informants told him that the Dwendis carried what appeared to be dried palm leaves or some kind of large hatlike object over their heads. Sanderson (1961, p. 165) observed: “This at first sounds like the silliest thing, but when one has heard it from highly educated men as well as from simple peasants, and all over an area as great as that from Peten [southern Mexico] to Nicaragua, one begins to wonder.” He then pointed out: “There are many Mayan bas-reliefs that show pairs of tiny little men with big hats but no clothes, standing among trees and amid the vast legs of demi-gods, priests, and warriors. They are also much smaller than the peasants bearing gifts to the temples” (Sanderson 1961, p. 166).

From the Guianas region of South America come accounts of wildmen called Didis. Early explorers heard reports about them from the Indians, who said they were about five feet tall, walked erect, and were covered with thick black hair.

In 1931, Nelloc Beccari, an anthropologist from Italy, heard an account of the Didi from Mr. Haines, the Resident Magistrate in British Guiana. Heuvelmans gave this summary of what Haines related to Beccari: “Haines told him that he had come upon a couple of di-di many years before when he was prospecting for gold. In 1910 he was going through the forest along the Konawaruk, a tributary which joins the Essequibo just above its junction with the Potaro, when he suddenly came upon two strange creatures, which stood up on their hind feet when they saw him. They had human features but were entirely covered with reddish brown fur. . . . the two creatures retreated slowly and disappeared into the forest” (Sanderson 1961, pp. 179–180).

After giving many similar accounts in his book about wildmen, Sanderson (1961, p. 181) stated: “The most significant single fact about these reports from Guiana is that never once has any local person—nor any person reporting what a local person says—so much as indicated that these creatures are just ‘monkeys.’ In all cases they have specified that they are tailless, erect, and have human attributes.”

From the eastern slopes of the Andes in Ecuador come reports of the Shiru, a small fur-covered hominidlike creature, about 4 to 5 feet tall (Sanderson 1961, p. 166). In Brazil, people tell of the large apelike Mapinguary, which leaves giant humanlike footprints and is said to kill cattle (Sanderson 1961, p. 174).

10.7 Yeti: Wildmen of The Himalayas

Diaries and other papers of British officials residing in the Himalayan region of the Indian subcontinent during the nineteenth century contain sporadic references to sightings and footprints of wildmen called Yeti. The Yeti were first mentioned by B. H. Hodgson, who from 1820 to 1843 served as British resident at the Nepalese court. Hodgson reported that in the course of a journey through northern Nepal his bearers were frightened by the sight of a hairy, tailless, humanlike creature.

Many will suggest, on hearing a report like this (and hundreds have been recorded since Hodgson’s time), that the Nepalese mistook an ordinary animal for a Yeti. The usual candidates for mistaken identity are bears and the langur monkey. But it is hard to imagine that lifelong residents of the Himalayas, intimately familiar with the wildlife, would have made such mistakes. Myra Shackley observed that Yeti are found in Nepalese and Tibetan religious paintings depicting hierarchies of living beings. “Here,” said Shackley (1983, p. 60), “bears, apes, and langurs are depicted separate from the wildman, suggesting there is no confusion (at least in the minds of the artists) between these forms.”

After reviewing the available reports, Ivan Sanderson (1961, p. 358) compiled the following composite description of the Yeti: “Somewhat larger than man-sized and much more sturdy, with short legs and long arms; clothed in long rather shaggy fur or hair, same length all over and not differentiated. Naked face and other parts jet black; bull-neck and small conical head with heavy browridges; fanged canine teeth; can drop hands to ground and stand on knuckles like gorilla. . . . heel very wide and foot almost square and very large, second toe longer and larger than first, and both these separated and semi-opposed to the remaining three which are very small and webbed.”

During the nineteenth century, at least one European reported personally seeing a captured animal that resembled a Yeti. A South African man told Myra Shackley (1983, p. 67): “Many years ago in India, my late wife’s mother told me how her mother had actually seen what might have been one of these creatures at Mussorie, in the Himalayan foothills. This semi-human was walking upright, but was obviously more animal than human with hair covering its whole body. It was reportedly caught up in the snows. . . . his captors had it in chains.”

During the twentieth century, sightings by Europeans of wildmen and their footprints continued, increasing during the Himalayan mountain-climbing expeditions of the 1930s. In 1938, H. W. Tilman followed a trail of footprints for a mile on a glacier, at an elevation of 19,000 feet. Speaking of one of his Sherpa guides, Tilman stated: “Sen Tensing, who had no doubt whatever that the creatures . . . that made the tracks were ‘Yetis’ or wild men, told me that two years before, he and a number of other Sherpas had seen one of them at a distance of about 25 yards at Thyangbochi. He described it as half man and half beast, standing about five feet six inches, with a tall pointed head, its body covered with reddish brown hair, but with a hairless face. . . . Whatever it was that he had seen, he was convinced that it was neither a bear nor a monkey, with both of which animals he was, of course, very familiar” (Heuvelmans 1962, pp. 136 –137).

During the Second World War, a man named Slavomir Rawicz escaped from a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp and made his way by foot to India. In The Long March (1956), a book describing his experiences, Rawicz stated that while traveling across the Himalayas, he encountered two wildmen, six feet in height and covered with long reddish hair. However, explorers familiar with the region traversed by Rawicz have pointed out some inconsistencies in his account of his journey. For example, he took an inordinate amount of time to travel a certain section of the route—even at his own stated rate of progress. Critics thus insinuated that Rawicz’s book, including the story of the wildmen, was largely if not completely fictional (Shackley 1983, pp. 54–55).

In November of 1951, Eric Shipton, while reconnoitering the approaches to Mt. Everest, found footprints on the Menlung glacier, near the border between Tibet and Nepal, at an elevation of 18,000 feet. Shipton followed the trail for a mile. Already well known as a mountaineer, Shipton could not easily be accused of publicity-seeking. A close-up photograph of one of the prints has proved convincing to many. Myra Shackley (1983, pp. 55–56) wrote: “Indeed, even the doubters admit that Shipton’s famous footprints, seen on the Menlung Glacier in 1951, cannot readily be explained away.”

The footprints were quite large. John R. Napier considered the possibility that the particular size and shape of the best Shipton footprint could have been caused by melting of the snow. Napier, however, noted (1973, p. 140): “Eric Shipton agrees that melting and sublimation might be responsible for the appearance, but he points out quite correctly that it would be reasonable to expect the narrow ridges behind and between the little toes to be the first features to disappear in these circumstances.” For Napier, Shipton’s observation appeared to rule out the snow-melting explanation, or at least make it far less likely. Napier proposed another possibility: “that the footprint is double—two tracks superimposed. But a double—what? I don’t know.”

Napier (1973, p. 141) concluded: “Something must have made the Shipton footprint. Like Mount Everest, it is there, and needs explaining. I only wish I could solve the puzzle; it would help me sleep better at night. Of course, it would settle a lot of problems if one could simply assume that the Yeti is alive. . . . The trouble is that such an assumption conflicts with the principles of biology as we know them.” In the end, Napier suggested that the Shipton footprint was the result of superimposed human feet, one shod and the other unshod. In general, Napier, who was fully convinced of the existence of the North American Sasquatch, was highly skeptical of the evidence for the Yeti. But, as we shall see later in this section, new evidence would cause Napier to become more inclined to accept the Himalayan wildmen.

In the course of his expeditions to the Himalaya Mountains in the 1950s and 1960s, Sir Edmund Hillary gave attention to evidence for the Yeti, including footprints in snow. He concluded that in every case the large footprints attributed to the Yeti had been produced by the merging of smaller tracks of known animals, by superimposition and melting. To this Napier (1973, pp. 57– 58), himself a skeptic, replied: “The signs of melting are so obvious that no one with any experience would confuse a melted footprint with a fresh one. Not all the prints seen over the years by reputable observers can be explained away in these terms; there must be other explanations for footprints, including, of course, the possibility that they were made by an animal unknown to science.”

But although Napier was unwilling to completely reject the existence of an unknown hominid, he was nevertheless inclined to regard this as the least probable or desirable alternative. In 1956, Professor E. S. Williams photographed some prints on the Biafo glacier in the Karakoram mountains. Napier, who thought it likely that they were the superimposed prints of the front and rear paws of a bear, said (1973, p. 130): “It is impossible to state categorically that Williams’s prints are those of a bear and not of a Yeti, but in the spirit of Bishop of Ockham it seems more reasonable to explain a phenomenon in terms of the known rather than the unknown.”

Of course, in avoiding the relatively straightforward explanation that a peculiar set of tracks in snow was made by an unknown animal, one is forced to come up with all kinds of speculative hypotheses about the superimposition of prints of various animals and humans, or the transformation of such prints by melting, in a manner not clearly understood. And this would also appear to be a violation of a key aspect of Ockham’s razor—namely, that the simplest of competing theories is preferable to the more complex.

In addition to Westerners, native informants also gave a continuous stream of reports on the Yeti. Lord Hunt, who headed a Mount Everest expedition in 1953, told of an incident recounted by the Tibetan Buddhist abbot of the Thyangboche monastery: “he gave a most graphic description of how a Yeti had appeared from the surrounding thickets, a few years back in the winter when the snow lay on the ground. This beast, loping along sometimes on its hind legs and sometimes on all fours, stood about five feet high and was covered with gray hair” (Shackley 1983, p. 62).

In 1958, Tibetan villagers from Tharbaleh, near the Rongbuk glacier, came upon a drowned Yeti, said Myra Shackley in her book on wildmen. The villagers described the creature as being like a small man with a pointed head and covered with reddish-brown fur (Shackley 1983, p. 1983).

Some Buddhist monasteries claim to have physical remains of the Yeti. One category of such relics is Yeti scalps, but the ones studied by Western scientists are thought to have been made from the skins of known animals (Shackley 1983, pp. 65–66). In 1960, Sir Edmund Hillary mounted an expedition to collect and evaluate evidence for the Yeti and sent a Yeti scalp from the Khumjung monastery to the West for testing. The results indicated that the scalp had been manufactured from the skin of the serow, a goatlike Himalayan antelope. But some disagreed with this analysis. Shackley (1983, p. 66) said they “pointed out that hairs from the scalp look distinctly monkey-like, and that it contains parasitic mites of a species different from that recovered from the serow.”

In the 1950s, Western explorers sponsored by American businessman Tom Slick obtained samples from a mummified Yeti hand kept at Pangboche. Shackley (1983, p. 66) stated: “detailed investigation of small skin samples back in European laboratories failed to reach a diagnosis. Local rumour maintains that the hand comes from a rather poorly mummified lama, but it has some curiously anthropoid features.”

In May of 1957, the Kathmandu Commoner carried a story about a Yeti head that had been kept for 25 years in the village of Chilunka, about 50 miles northeast of Kathmandu. The head reportedly had been severed from the corpse of a Yeti slain by Nepalese soldiers, who had hunted down the creature after it had killed many of their comrades (Shackley 1983, p. 66). Concerning another specimen, Shackley noted that Chemed Rigdzin Dorje, a Tibetan lama, spoke of the existence of a complete mummified Yeti.

Over the years, sightings continued. In 1970, mountaineer Don Willans was researching an approach to Annapurna, a high peak in northern Nepal. He found some tracks and at night saw an apelike creature bounding across the snow. Napier (1973, p. 135), still skeptical, said it could have been a langur monkey.

In 1978, Lord Hunt, who headed the British Mt. Everest expedition of 1953, saw Yeti tracks and heard the high-pitched cry the Yeti is said to make. Lord Hunt, described by Shackley as “a vigorous champion of the Yeti,” had come upon similar tracks in 1953. In both 1953 and 1978, the tracks were found at altitudes of 15,000 to 20,000 feet, too high for the either the black or red bears of the Himalayas. Shackley (1983, p. 56) stated: “The tracks seen by Lord Hunt in 1978 were very fresh, and it was possible to see the impression of the toes, convincing him that the footprint represented the actual size and shape of the feet, about 13¾ in. long and 6¾ in. broad. . . . This is especially interesting since it has, of course, been frequently contended that such tracks are made either by other animals (bears or langurs being the most favoured), or by the impressions of human feet which have become exaggerated in the melting snow.”

It is interesting to note that science has recognized the existence of many fossil species on the strength of their footprints alone. Heuvelmans (1982, p. 3) stated: “The hypotheses and reconstructions of cryptozoology (regarding animals actually alive) are no more daring, questionable, fantastic, or illegitimate than those upon which paleontology has based its reconstructions of the fauna of past ages. . . . It seemed perfectly legitimate to give the scientific name Chirotherium to a fossil genus known only by its tracks, found in Germany, England, France, Spain, Italy, and the United States, and of which some 20 species have been described. Yet, at the same time, it seemed ridiculous, premature, and absurd to describe scientifically the Himalayan Yeti, known not only by many tracks not identifiable with any known animal, but also by morphology and behavior as related by numerous eyewitnesses.”

In 1986, Marc E. Miller and William Caccioli, of the New World Explorers Society, retraced the route of Hillary’s 1960 Yeti expedition, visiting the Buddhist monasteries at Khumjung, Thyangboche, and Pangboche. At Khumjung, Miller and Caccioli interviewed Khonjo Khumbi, the village elder who accompanied Hillary to the United States with the famous Yeti scalp. Khonjo told Miller and Caccioli that in the course of his travels through Tibet he had seen whole Yeti furs. The High Lama of the Thyangboche monastery also said he had seen such furs in the homes of great hunters.

Miller and Caccioli (1986, p. 82) reported that they received possible Yeti chest hairs from an elderly woman of Khumjung village in Tibet: “We were told that her son was carrying potatoes along a trail in 1978, and was allegedly attacked by a Yeti. The Yeti was described as a large male, nearly 7 feet tall, and covered with dark and reddish hair. During the course of the attack, the young man took his potato hoe and struck the Yeti across the chest. The Yeti fled into the higher mountain region. The young man struggled back to Khumjung village to his mother, and described his encounter with the Yeti. His wounds were serious, and he later died.”

Figure 10.1. Areas where Yetis have been sighted in Central Asia and the Himalayas are shaded with vertical black bars (after Shackley 1983, pp. 78–79).

Figure 10.2. Drawing of a Mongolian Almas from a 19th-century Tibetan book (Shackley 1983, p. 97).

10.8 The Almas of Central Asia

The Sasquatch and the Yeti, from the descriptions available, are large and very apelike. But there is another wildman, the Almas, which seems smaller and more human. Reports of the Almas are concentrated in an area extending from Mongolia in the north, south through the Pamirs, and then westward into the Caucasus region. Similar reports come from Siberia and the far northeast parts of the Russian republic.

Early in the fifteenth century, Hans Schiltenberger was captured by the Turks and sent to the court of Tamerlane, who placed him in the retinue of a Mongol prince named Egidi. After returning to Europe in 1427, Schiltenberger wrote about his experiences. In his book, he described some mountains, apparently the Tien Shan range in Mongolia: “The inhabitants say that beyond the mountains is the beginning of a wasteland which lies at the edge of the earth. No one can survive there because the desert is populated by so many snakes and tigers. In the mountains themselves live wild people, who have nothing in common with other human beings. A pelt covers the entire body of these creatures. Only the hands and face are free of hair. They run around in the hills like animals and eat foliage and grass and whatever else they can find. The lord of the territory made Egidi a present of a couple of forest people, a man and a woman. They had been caught in the wilderness, together with three untamed horses the size of asses and all sorts of other animals which are not found in German lands and which I cannot therefore put a name to” (Shackley 1983, p. 93).

Myra Shackley (1983, pp. 93 – 94) found Schiltenberger’s account especially credible for two reasons: “First, Schiltenberger reports that he saw the creatures with his own eyes. Secondly, he refers to Przewalski horses, which were only rediscovered by Nicholai Przewalski in 1881. . . . Przewalski himself saw

‘wildmen’ in Mongolia in 1871.”

A drawing of an Almas is found in a nineteenth-century Mongol compendium of medicines derived from various plants and animals. The text next to the picture reads: “The wildman lives in the mountains, his origins close to that of the bear, his body resembles that of man, and he has enormous strength. His meat may be eaten to treat mental diseases and his gall cures jaundice” (Shackley 1983, p. 98).

Shackley (1983, p. 98) noted: “The book contains thousands of illustrations of various classes of animals (reptiles, mammals and amphibia), but not one single mythological animal such as are known from similar medieval European books. All the creatures are living and observable today. There seems no reason at all to suggest that the Almas did not exist also and illustrations seem to suggest that it was found among rocky habitats, in the mountains.”

In 1937, Dordji Meiren, a member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, saw the skin of an Almas in a monastery in the Gobi desert. The lamas were using it as a carpet in some of their rituals. Shackley (1983, pp. 103 –104) stated: “The hairs on the skin were reddish and curly. . . . The features [of the face] were hairless, the face had eyebrows, and the head still had long disordered hair. Fingers and toes were in a good state of preservation and the nails were similar to human nails.”

A report of a more recent sighting of live wildmen was related to Myra Shackley by Dmitri Bayanov, of the Darwin Museum in Moscow. In 1963, Ivan Ivlov, a Russian pediatrician, was traveling through the Altai mountains in the southern part of Mongolia. Ivlov saw several humanlike creatures standing on a mountain slope. They appeared to be a family group, composed of a male, female, and child. Ivlov observed the creatures through his binoculars from a distance of half a mile until they moved out of his field of vision. His Mongolian driver also saw them and said they were common in that area. Shackley (1983, p. 91) stated: “So we are not dealing with folktales or local legends, but with an event that was recorded by a trained scientist and transmitted to the proper authorities. There is no reason to doubt Ivlov’s word, partly because of his impeccable scientific reputation and partly because, although he had heard local stories about these creatures he had remained sceptical about their existence.”

After his encounter with the Almas family, Ivlov interviewed many Mongolian children, believing they would be more candid than adults. The children provided many additional reports about the Almas. For example, one child told Ivlov that while he and some other children were swimming in a stream, he saw a male Almas carry a child Almas across it (Shackley 1983, pp. 91–92).

In 1980, a worker at an experimental agricultural station, operated by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences at Bulgan, encountered the dead body of a wildman: “I approached and saw a hairy corpse of a robust humanlike creature dried and half-buried by sand. I had never seen such a humanlike being before covered by camel-colour brownish-yellow short hairs and I recoiled, although in my native land in Sinkiang I had seen many dead men killed in battle. . . . The dead thing was not a bear or ape and at the same time it was not a man like Mongol or Kazakh or Chinese and Russian. The hairs of its head were longer than on its body” (Shackley 1983, p. 107).

The Pamir mountains, lying in a remote region where the borders of Tadzhikistan, China, Kashmir, and Afghanistan meet, have been the scene of many Almas sightings. In 1925, Mikhail Stephanovitch Topilski, a major-general in the Soviet army, led his unit in an assault on an anti-Soviet guerilla force hiding in a cave in the Pamirs. One of the surviving guerillas said that while in the cave he and his comrades were attacked by several apelike creatures. Topilski ordered the rubble of the cave searched, and the body of one such creature was found. Topilski reported (Shackley 1983, pp. 118–119): “At first glance I thought the body was that of an ape. It was covered with hair all over. But I knew there were no apes in the Pamirs. Also, the body itself looked very much like that of a man. We tried pulling the hair, to see if it was just a hide used for disguise, but found that it was the creature’s own natural hair. We turned the body over several times on its back and its front, and measured it. Our doctor made a long and thorough inspection of the body, and it was clear that it was not a human being.”

“The body,” continued Topilski, “belonged to a male creature 165–170 cm [about 5½ feet] tall, elderly or even old, judging by the greyish colour of the hair in several places. The chest was covered with brownish hair and the belly with greyish hair. The hair was longer but sparser on the chest and close-cropped and thick on the belly. In general the hair was very thick, without any underfur. There was least hair on the buttocks, from which fact our doctor deduced that the creature sat like a human being. There was most hair on the hips. The knees were completely bare of hair and had callous growths on them. The whole foot including the sole was quite hairless and was covered by hard brown skin. The hair got thinner near the hand, and the palms had none at all but only callous skin.”

Topilski added: “The colour of the face was dark, and the creature had neither beard nor moustache. The temples were bald and the back of the head was covered by thick, matted hair. The dead creature lay with its eyes open and its teeth bared. The eyes were dark and the teeth were large and even and shaped like human teeth. The forehead was slanting and the eyebrows were very powerful. The protruding jawbones made the face resemble the Mongol type of face. The nose was flat, with a deeply sunk bridge. The ears were hairless and looked a little more pointed than a human being’s with a longer lobe. The lower jaw was very massive. The creature had a very powerful chest and well developed muscles. . . . The arms were of normal length, the hands were slightly wider and the feet much wider and shorter than man’s.”

In 1957, Alexander Georgievitch Pronin, a hydrologist at the Geographical Research Institute of Leningrad University, participated in an expedition to the Pamirs, for the purpose of mapping glaciers. On August 2, 1957, while his team was investigating the Fedchenko glacier, Pronin hiked into the valley of the Balyandkiik River. Shackley (1983, p. 120) stated: “at noon he noticed a figure standing on a rocky cliff about 500 yards above him and the same distance away. His first reaction was surprise, since this area was known to be uninhabited, and his second was that the creature was not human. It resembled a man but was very stooped. He watched the stocky figure move across the snow, keeping its feet wide apart, and he noted that its forearms were longer than a human’s and it was covered with reddish grey hair.” Pronin saw the creature again three days later, walking upright. Since this incident, there have been numerous wildman sightings in the Pamirs, and members of various expeditions have photographed and taken casts of footprints (Shackley 1983, pp. 122–126).

We shall now consider reports about the Almas from the Caucasus region. According to testimony from villagers of Tkhina, on the Mokvi River, a female Almas was captured there during the nineteenth century, in the forests of Mt. Zaadan. For three years, she was kept imprisoned, but then became domesticated and was allowed to live in a house. She was called Zana. Shackley (1983, p. 112) stated: “Her skin was a greyish-black colour, covered with reddish hair, longer on her head than elsewhere. She was capable of inarticulate cries but never developed a language. She had a large face with big cheek bones, muzzle-like prognathous jaw and large eyebrows, big white teeth and a ‘fierce expression.’” Eventually Zana, through sexual relations with a villager, had children. Some of Zana’s grandchildren were seen by Boris Porshnev in 1964. In her account of Porshnev’s investigations, Shackley (1983, p. 113) noted: “The grandchildren, Chalikoua and Taia, had darkish skin of rather negroid appearance, with very prominent chewing muscles and extra strong jaws.” Porshnev also interviewed villagers who as children had been present at Zana’s funeral in the 1880s.

In the Caucasus region, the Almas is sometimes called Biaban-guli. In 1899, K. A. Satunin, a Russian zoologist, spotted a female Biaban-guli in the Talysh hills of the southern Caucasus. He stated that the creature had “fully human movements” (Shackley 1983, p. 109). The fact that Satunin was a well-known zoologist makes his report particularly significant.

In 1941, V. S. Karapetyan, a lieutenant colonel of the medical service of the Soviet army, performed a direct physical examination of a living wildman captured in the Dagestan autonomous republic, just north of the Caucasus mountains. Karapetyan said: “I entered a shed with two members of the local authorities. When I asked why I had to examine the man in a cold shed and not in a warm room, I was told that the prisoner could not be kept in a warm room. He had sweated in the house so profusely that they had had to keep him in the shed. I can still see the creature as it stood before me, a male, naked and bare-footed. And it was doubtlessly a man, because its entire shape was human. The chest, back, and shoulders, however, were covered with shaggy hair of a dark brown colour. This fur of his was much like that of a bear, and 2 to 3 centimeters [1 inch] long. The fur was thinner and softer below the chest. His wrists were crude and sparsely covered with hair. The palms of his hands and soles of his feet were free of hair. But the hair on his head reached to his shoulders partly covering his forehead. The hair on his head, moreover, felt very rough to the hand. He had no beard or moustache, though his face was completely covered with a light growth of hair. The hair around his mouth was also short and sparse. The man stood absolutely straight with his arms hanging, and his height was above the average—about 180 cm [almost 5 feet 11 inches]. He stood before me like a giant, his mighty chest thrust forward. His fingers were thick, strong and exceptionally large. On the whole, he was considerably bigger than any of the local inhabitants. His eyes told me nothing. They were dull and empty—the eyes of an animal. And he seemed to me like an animal and nothing more” (Sanderson 1961, pp. 295–296). Significantly, the creature had lice of a kind different from those that infect humans. It is reports like this that have led scientists such as British anthropologist Myra Shackley and Soviet anatomist Dr. Zh. I. Kofman to conclude that the Almas may represent a relict population of Neanderthals or perhaps even Homo erectus (Shackley 1983, p. 114). What happened to the wildman of Dagestan? According to published accounts, he was shot by his Soviet military captors as they retreated before the advancing German army.

In the 1950s, Yu. I. Merezhinski, senior lecturer in the department of ethnography and anthropology at Kiev University, was doing research in Azerbaijan, in the northern part of the Caucasus region. From local people, Merezhinski heard reports of an Almas-like wildman called the Kaptar. Khadzi Magoma, an expert hunter, told Merezhinski that he would take him to a stream where the Kaptar sometimes bathed at night. In exchange, the hunter asked Merezhinski to take a flash photo of the creature for him. Merezhinski agreed, and they went to the stream, near which a few albino Kaptars were said to live. Shackley (1983, p. 110) stated: “sure enough Merezhinski saw one from a distance of only a few yards, clearly discernible on the river bank through the bushes. It was damp, lean and covered from head to foot with white hair. Unfortunately the reality of the creature was too much for Merezhinski, who instead of photographing it shot at it with his revolver but missed in his excitement. The old hunter, furious at the deception, refused to repeat the experiment.”

Here once more we have a report by a professional scientist who directly observed a wildman. As an anthropologist, Merezhinski was particularly well qualified to evaluate what he saw. It is reports like this that tend to dispel the charge that the Almas is a creature that exists only in folklore.

And as far as folklore is concerned, accounts of the Almas and other wildmen are not necessarily a sign that the Almas is imaginary. Dmitri Bayanov, of the Darwin Museum in Moscow, asked (1982, p. 47): “Is the abundant folklore, say, about the wolf or the bear not a consequence of the existence of these animals and man’s knowledge of them?” Bayanov (1982, p. 47) added: “Therefore we say that, if relic hominoids were not reflected in folklore and mythology, then their reality can be called into question.”

10.9 Wildmen of China

“Chinese historical documents, and many city and town annals, contain abundant records of Wildman, which are given various names,” states Zhou Guoxing of the Beijing Museum of Natural History (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 13).

Two thousand years ago, the poet-statesman Qu Yuan made many references to Shangui (mountain ogres) in his verses. Li Yanshow, a historian who lived during the T’Ang Dynasty (a.d. 618–907), stated that the forests of Hubei province sheltered a band of wildmen. Wildmen also appeared in the writings of Li Shizhen, a pharmacologist of the Ming Dynasty (a.d. 1368–1644). In the fifty-first volume of his massive work on medical ingredients, he described several species of humanoid creatures, including one named Fei-fei.

Li wrote: “‘Feifei,’ which are called ‘manbear,’ are also found in the mountainous areas in west Shu (part of Sichuan Province today) and Chu division, where people skin them and eat their palms. The You mountain of Sha county, Fujian province, sees the same ones, standing about one zhang (equal to 3.1 meters [ just over 10 feet]) in height and smiling to the people they come across, and are called ‘shandaren’ (men as big as mountains), ‘wildmen,’ or ‘shanxiao’” (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 13).

In the eighteenth century, the Chinese poet Yuan Mei made reference to strange creatures inhabiting the wild regions of Shanxi province, calling them “monkeylike, yet not monkeylike” (Yuan and Huang 1979, p. 57).

According to Zhou: “Even today, in the area of Fang County, Hubei Province, there are still legends about ‘maoren’ (hairy men) or ‘wildmen.’ A local chronicle, about 200 years old, says that ‘the Fang mountain lying 40 li (2 li equals one kilometer [.62 mile]) south to the county town is precipitous and full of holes, where live many maoren, about one zhang high and hair-coated. They often come down to eat human beings and chickens and dogs, and seize those who fight with them.’A lantern on which there is an ornament of a ‘maoren’ figure was unearthed in this area during an archaeological excavation. It has been dated at 2,000 years” (Zhou, G. 1982, pp. 13–14).

There have been many other reports of wildmen from the Hubei province in central China. In 1922, a militiaman is said to have captured a wildman, but there are no further records of this incident (Poirier et al. 1983, p. 32).

In 1940, Wang Zelin, a graduate of the biology department of Northwestern University in Chicago, was able to directly see a wildman shortly after it was shot to death by hunters. Wang was driving from Baoji, in Shanxi Province, to Tianshui, in Gansu Province, when he heard gunfire ahead of him. He got out of the car to satisfy his curiosity and saw a corpse. It was a female creature, six and a half feet tall and covered with a coat of thick greyish-red hair about one and a quarter inches long. The hair on its face was shorter. The cheek bones were prominent, and the lips jutted out. The hair on the head was about one foot long. According to Wang, the creature looked like a reconstruction of the Chinese Homo erectus (Yuan and Huang 1979, p. 57; Shackley 1983, pp. 79–82).

Ten years later, another scientist, Fun Jinquan, a geologist, saw some living wildmen. Zhou Guoxing stated: “With the help of local guides, he watched, at a safe distance, two local Wildmen in the mountain forest near Baoji County, Shanxi Province, in the spring of 1950. They were mother and son, the smaller one being 1.6 meters [5.25 feet] in height. Both looked human” (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 14).

In 1957, a middle-school teacher of biology in Zhejiang province obtained the hands and feet of a “manbear” killed by local peasants. Zhou Guoxing wrote: “In December 1980, I went to Sui Chang to study these hand and foot specimens. I concluded beyond any doubt, that they belong to a higher primate, and have morphological traits of both ape and monkey. The eyewitnesses thought that they had belonged to a Wildman, or of a manlike ‘strange animal,’ but after examining the specimens, I determined that they were not the hands and feet of a Wildman. They might possibly belong to an enormous monkey (perhaps of a species of macaque not previously recorded in this area). . . . There is no denying the possibility that they came from an unknown primate in the Jiolong Mountain area” (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 18).

Talk of the existence of an enormous monkey, previously unknown, raises interesting questions about the Beijing Homo erectus finds. Beijing man, as generally portrayed in textbooks and films, was quite human and almost civilized, a Middle Pleistocene hunter, fire maker, and cave dweller. But as several dissenting scientists noted, most of the Beijing man fossils were thick, bigbrowed partial skulls with smashed braincases. They appeared to represent not a relatively advanced protohuman but rather the unfortunate animallike prey of some more intelligent hominid. Perhaps the large, hitherto unknown species of macaque posited by Zhou in order to explain away some modern wildman evidence also inhabited China during the Middle Pleistocene, and the smashed skulls in the Zhoukoudian cave belonged to it. Or perhaps the broken skulls of Zhoukoudian belonged to the Homo erectus-like creature described above by Wang Zelin.

In 1961, workers building a road through the heavily forested Xishuang Banna region of Yunnan province in southernmost China reported killing a humanlike female primate. The creature was 1.2–1.3 meters (about 4 feet) tall and covered with hair. It walked upright, and according to the eyewitness reports, its hands, ears, and breasts were like those of a female human. The Chinese Academy of Sciences sent a team to investigate, but they were not able to obtain any physical evidence. Some suggested that the workers had come upon a gibbon. But Zhou Guoxing stated: “The present author recently visited a newsman who took part in that investigation. He stated that the animal which had been killed was not a gibbon, but an unknown animal of human shape. It is worth noting that, over the past 2 years or so, some people in the western border areas of Yunnan Province say that the above-mentioned kind of Wildman still move about, and that another one has since been killed” (Zhou, G. 1982, pp. 15–16).

In 1976, six cadres from the Shennongjia forestry region in Hubei province were driving at night down the highway near the village of Chunshuya, between Fangxian county and Shennongjia. On the way, they encountered a “strange tailless creature with reddish fur” (Yuan and Huang 1979, p. 56). Fortunately, it stood still long enough for five of the people to get out of the car and look at it from a distance of only a few feet, while the driver kept his headlights trained on it. The observers were certain that it was not a bear or any other creature with which they were familiar. They reported the incident in a telegram to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Peking.

Over the years, Academy officials had received many similar reports from the same region of Hubei province. So when they heard about this incident, they decided to thoroughly investigate the matter. A scientific expedition consisting of more than 100 members proceeded to Hubei province. They collected physical evidence, in the form of hair, footprints, and feces, and recorded sightings by the local inhabitants (Yuan and Huang 1979). Subsequent research has added to these results.

Altogether, more than a thousand footprints have been found in Hubei province, some more than 19 inches long (Poirier et al. 1983, p. 34). Over 100 hairs have been collected, the longest measuring 21 inches. Some of the hairs were supplied by persons who claimed to have seen wildmen; others were taken from trees against which wildmen were said to have rubbed. Frank E. Poirier, an anthropologist at Ohio State University, reported (Poirier et al. 1983, p. 33): “The hair was studied by the Hubei Provincial Medical College and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. The general consensus is that the hair belongs to a higher primate (monkey, ape, or human).”

Some have sought to explain sightings of wildmen in the Shennongjia region of Hubei province as encounters with the rare golden monkey, which inhabits the same area. The golden monkey might very well account for reports of creatures glimpsed for a moment at a great distance. But consider the case of Pang Gensheng, a local commune leader, who was confronted in the forest by a wildman.

Pang, who stood face to face with the creature, at a distance of five feet for about an hour, said: “He was about seven feet tall, with shoulders wider than a man’s, a sloping forehead, deep-set eyes and a bulbous nose with slightly upturned nostrils. He had sunken cheeks, ears like a man’s but bigger, and round eyes, also bigger than a man’s. His jaw jutted out and he had protruding lips. His front teeth were as broad as a horse’s. His eyes were black. His hair was dark brown, more than a foot long and hung loosely over his shoulders. His whole face, except for the nose and ears, was covered with short hairs. His arms hung down to below his knees. He had big hands with fingers about six inches long and thumbs only slightly separated from the fingers. He didn’t have a tail and the hair on his body was short. He had thick thighs, shorter than the lower part of his leg. He walked upright with his legs apart. His feet were each about 12 inches long and half that broad—broader in front and narrow behind, with splayed toes” (Yuan and Huang 1979, pp. 58–59).

Zhou Guoxing has suggested that the wildman of Hubei province might be a relict population of Gigantopithecus, a large apelike hominid that inhabited southern China during the Middle Pleistocene. Zhou noted that in the forests of Hubei province some types of trees from the Tertiary have survived, as have the panda and other mammals from the Middle Pleistocene (Zhou, G. 1982, p. 22).

10.10 Wildmen of Malaysia And Indonesia

In 1969, John McKinnon, who journeyed to Borneo to observe orangutans, came across some humanlike footprints. McKinnon asked his Malay boatman what made them. “Without a moment’s hesitation he replied ‘Batutut,’” wrote McKinnon, “but when I asked him to describe the beast he said it was not an animal but a type of ghost. . . . Batutut, he told me, is about four feet tall, walks upright like a man and has a long black mane. . . . Like other spirits of the forest the creature is very shy of light and fire” (Green 1978, p. 134).

Later, in Malaya, McKinnon saw some casts of footprints even bigger than those he had seen in Borneo, but he recognized them as definitely having been made by the same kind of creature. The Malayans called it Orangpendek (short fellow). McKinnon stated: “Again natives spoke of a creature with long hair, who walks upright like a man. Drawings and even photographs of similar footprints found in Sumatra are attributed to the Sedapa or Umang, a small, shy, long-haired, bipedal being living deep in the forest” (Green 1978, pp. 134 –135). According to Ivan Sanderson, these footprints differ from those of the anthropoid apes inhabiting the Indonesian forests (the gibbon, siamang, and orangutan). They are also distinct from those of the sun bear (Sanderson 1961, p. 219).

Early in the twentieth century, L. C. Westenek, a governor of Sumatra, received a written report about an encounter with a Sedapa wildman. The overseer of an estate in the Barisan Mountains, along with some workers, observed the Sedapa from a distance of 15 yards. The overseer said he saw “a large creature, low on its feet, which ran like a man, and was about to cross my path; it was very hairy and it was not an orang-utan; but its face was not like an ordinary man’s. It silently and gravely gave the men a disagreeable stare and then ran calmly away” (Sanderson 1961, pp. 216–217).

In a journal article about wildmen published in 1918, Westenek recorded a report from a Mr. Oostingh, who lived in Sumatra. Once while proceeding through the forest, he came upon a man sitting on a log and facing away from him. Oostingh stated: “I saw that he had short hair, cut short, I thought; and I suddenly realised that his neck was oddly leathery and extremely filthy. ‘That chap’s got a very dirty and wrinkled neck!’ I said to myself. His body was as large as a medium-sized native’s and he had thick square shoulders, not sloping at all. . . . he seemed to be quite as tall as I (about 5 feet 9 inches). Then I saw that it was not a man.”

“It was not an orang-utan,” declared Oostingh. “I had seen one of these large apes a short time before.” What was the creature if not an orangutan? Oostingh could not say for sure: “It was more like a monstrously large siamang, but a siamang has long hair, and there was no doubt that it had short hair” (Sanderson 1961, p. 220).

In 1918, Mr. Van Heerwarden, a hunter, began finding tracks of the Sedapa in Sumatra. The footprints he saw were shaped like those of a small human being. Van Heerwarden also heard reports about the Sedapa from natives. In October of 1923, he himself spotted one in a tree: “I discovered a dark and hairy creature on a branch. . . . The sedapa was also hairy on the front of its body; the colour there was a little lighter than on the back. The very dark hair on its head fell to just below the shoulder-blades or even almost to the waist. . . . Had it been standing, its arms would have reached to a little above its knees; they were therefore long, but its legs seemed to me rather short. I did not see its feet, but I did see some toes which were shaped in a very normal manner. . . . There was nothing repulsive or ugly about its face, nor was it at all apelike” (Sanderson

1961, pp. 222–223). After observing it for a while, Van Heerwarden allowed the creature to run away.

The presence of large humanlike creatures in the forests of the Indonesian archipelago is relevant to the dating of fossils of Homo erectus found in Java (Chapter 7). Paleoanthropologists assume that fossils displaying Homo erectus morphology must be 800,000 or more years old, even when they are found on the surface. In fact, almost all the fossils of Homo erectus from Java have been surface finds. But if creatures resembling Homo erectus are still roaming the forests of Indonesia, then the general practice of dating a fossil by its morphology is not secure. On January 20, 1986, Bernard Heuvelmans wrote in response to a letter from our researcher, Stephen Bernath: “I am convinced myself that fossils, especially remains of Hominoids, are dated not after the strata they have been found in but after a prejudiced idea of the strata they should have been found in according to the classical scheme of human evolution, which is completely wrong.”

In practice, morphological dating has worked like this. During the 1930s, many fossil skull fragments were found lying on the surface at various locations in Java. The formations in the region have since been dated by the potassiumargon method to the Middle Pleistocene. The potassium-argon method, it may be recalled, is used to date volcanic materials, not the bones themselves. Ideally, for a bone to be assigned a Middle Pleistocene date using this method, it should have been found lying beneath an undisturbed layer of volcanic material. But in Java this was not the case, for almost without exception the fossils labeled Homo erectus were found lying on the surface or in unspecified locations. Scientists have simply assumed that the bones eroded from Middle Pleistocene formations, in which they had supposedly been deposited hundreds of thousands of years ago. The reason scientists feel comfortable in making this assumption is that they are certain that hominids with erectus morphology have been extinct since the Middle Pleistocene. But perhaps not. Heuvelmans stated in his letter of January 20, 1986: “small hairy hominoids, with long straight hair on the head, the Nittaewo, were exterminated at the end of the 18th century in Sri Lanka. According to British leading primatologist Osman Hill (1945), these dwarfs could be modern representatives of Homo erectus.”

Such evidence makes possible another explanation for erectus-like fossils found on the surface of Middle Pleistocene formations, in Java and elsewhere. As far as Java is concerned, perhaps as little as 10,000 years ago, a Sedapalike creature died by a stream bed or lake shore, and its bones became fossilized in the sediments. In very recent times, a piece of the fragmented skull reappeared on the surface, where it was discovered by native collectors, who turned it over to a paleoanthropologist. Upon seeing its primitive erectus-like morphology, the paleoanthropologist assigned it to the Middle Pleistocene, giving it a date of 800,000 years or more. The fossil was then described in textbooks and cited as more proof for the hypothesis that modern human beings evolved over the past several hundred thousand years from more apelike ancestors. But the fossil may not actually belong to the Middle Pleistocene. It could in fact be much more recent.

Whether the Java Homo erectus fossils are recent or ancient, the existence of living erectus-like creatures (or recently living ones) in Java shows the coexistence of such creatures with humans in modern times. And, as we have seen in previous chapters, there is much evidence such creatures coexisted with humans in the distant past. This throws the accepted pattern of human evolution into complete confusion.

Paleoanthropologists, in the face of such evidence, or in ignorance of it, will insist that human beings of modern type could not have existed any earlier than one hundred thousand years ago, and certainly not in the Early Pleistocene, the Pliocene, or the Miocene.

But if there is uncertainty about what kinds of hominids may be around today, how can we be so sure about what kinds of hominids may or may not have been around in the distant past?

Empiric investigation of the fossil record may not be a sure guide. As Heuvelmans stated in a letter (April 15, 1986) to our researcher Stephen Bernath: “do not overestimate the importance of the fossil record. Fossilization is a very rare, exceptional phenomenon, and the fossil record cannot thus give us an exact image of life on earth during the past geological periods. The fossil record of primates is particularly poor because very intelligent and cautious animals can avoid more easily the very conditions of fossilization—such as sinking in mud or peat, for instance.”

The empiric method undoubtedly has its limitations, and the fossil record is incomplete and imperfect. But when all the fossil evidence, including that for very ancient humans and living ape-men, is objectively evaluated, the pattern that emerges is one of coexistence rather than sequential evolution.

10.11 Africa

Native informants from several countries in the western part of the African continent, such as the Ivory Coast, have given accounts of a race of pygmylike creatures covered with reddish hair. Europeans have also encountered them: “During one of his expeditions in the course of 1947, the great elephant-hunter Dunckel killed a peculiar primate unknown to him; it was small with reddishbrown hair and was shot in the great forest . . . between the Sassandra and Cavally rivers” (Sanderson 1961, p. 189). Natives are said to have bartered with these red-haired pygmies, called Sehites, leaving various trinkets in exchange for fruits (Sanderson 1961, p. 190).

Wildman reports also come from East Africa. Capt. William Hitchens reported in the December 1937 issue of Discovery: “Some years ago I was sent on an official lion-hunt in this area (the Ussure and Simibit forests on the western side of the Wembare plains) and, while waiting in a forest glade for a man-eater, I saw two small, brown, furry creatures come from dense forest on one side of the glade and disappear into the thickets on the other. They were like little men, about 4 feet high, walking upright, but clad in russet hair. The native hunter with me gazed in mingled fear and amazement. They were, he said, agogwe, the little furry men whom one does not see once in a lifetime” (Sanderson 1961, p. 191). Were they just apes or monkeys? It does not seem that either Hitchens or the native hunter accompanying him would have been unable to recognize an ape or monkey. Many reports of the Agogwe emanate from Tanzania and Mozambique (Green 1978, p. 133).

From the Congo region come reports of the Kakundakari and Kilomba. About 5.5 feet tall and covered with hair, they are said to walk upright like humans. Charles Cordier, a professional animal collector who worked for many zoos and museums, followed tracks of the Kakundakari in Zaire in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Once, said Cordier, a Kakundakari had become entangled in one of his bird snares. “It fell on its face,” said Cordier, “turned over, sat up, took the noose off its feet, and walked away before the nearby African could do anything” (Green 1978, p. 133).

Reports of such creatures also come from southern Africa. Pascal Tassy (1983, pp. 132–133), of the Laboratory of Vertebrate and Human Paleontology, wrote in a review of Heuvelmans’s Les Bêtes Humaines d’Afrique (which has a chapter on relict australopithecines): “Philip V. Tobias, now on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Cryptozoology, once told Heuvelmans that one of his colleagues had set traps to capture living australopithecines.” Tobias, from South Africa, is a recognized authority on Australopithecus.

According to standard views, the last australopithecines perished approximately 750,000 years ago, and Homo erectus died out around 200,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals, it is said, vanished about 35,000 years ago, and since then fully modern humans alone have existed throughout the entire world. Yet many sightings of different kinds of wildmen in various parts of the world strongly challenge the standard view. Also, recent fossil skulls reportedly display anomalously primitive features. For example, Nature (1908, vol. 77, p. 587) published a report by Dr. K. Stolyhwo on a recent Neanderthal skull, found as part of a skeleton in a tomb that also contained a suit of chain armor and iron spearheads. Stolyhwo said the skull was similar to the Spy Neanderthal skull.

10.12 Mainstream Science and Wildman Reports

Despite all the evidence we have presented, most recognized authorities in anthropology and zoology decline to discuss the existence of wildmen. If they mention wildmen at all, they rarely present the really strong evidence for their existence, focusing instead on the reports least likely to challenge their disbelief.

Skeptical scientists say that no one has found any bones of wildmen; nor, they say, has anyone produced a single body, dead or alive. But as we have seen, hand and foot bones of wildmen, and even a head, have been collected. Competent persons report having examined bodies of wildmen. And there are also a number of accounts of capture. That none of this physical evidence has made its way into museums and other scientific institutions may be taken as a failure of the process for gathering and preserving evidence. The operation of what we could call a knowledge filter tends to keep evidence tinged with disrepute outside official channels.

However, some scientists with solid reputations, such as Krantz, Napier, Shackley, Porshnev, and others, have found in the available evidence enough reason to conclude that wildmen do in fact exist, or, at least, that the question of their existence is worthy of serious study.

Myra Shackley wrote to our researcher Steve Bernath on December 4, 1984: “As you know, this whole question is highly topical, and there has been an awful lot of correspondence and publication flying around on the scene. Opinions vary, but I guess that the commonest would be that there is indeed sufficient evidence to suggest at least the possibility of the existence of various unclassified manlike creatures, but that in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to comment on their significance in any more detail. The position is further complicated by misquotes, hoaxing, and lunatic fringe activities, but a surprising number of hardcore anthropologists seem to be of the opinion that the matter is very worthwhile investigating.”

So there is some scientific recognition of the wildman evidence, but it seems to be largely a matter of privately expressed views, with little or no official recognition.

Always Something New Out of Africa

Always something new out of Africa. –Pliny the Elder (a.d. 27–79)

The controversies surrounding Java man and Beijing man, what to speak of Castenedolo man and the European eoliths, have long since subsided. As for the disputing scientists, most of them are in their graves, their bones on the way to disintegration or fossilization. But today Africa, the land of Australopithecus and Homo habilis, remains an active battlefield, with scientists skirmishing to establish their views on human origins.

Only in the later decades of the twentieth century did paleoanthropologists shift the main focus of their discipline from Europe and Asia to Africa. But the importance of Africa was foreseen by Darwin (1871, p. 199), who wrote in The Descent of Man: “In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are man’s nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.”

In this chapter, we survey the history of paleoanthropological discoveries in Africa. The finds from the early part of the twentieth century, such as Reck’s skeleton (Section 11.1) and the Kanjera skulls and Kanam jaw (Section 11.2), were controversial. According to their discoverers, these fossils represented evidence for anatomically modern humans in the Early Pleistocene. Anomalous finds continued to occur even in the latter part of the twentieth century. Among these we may number the Kanapoi humerus (Section 11.5.1), the ER 1481 femur from Lake Turkana (Section 11.6.3), and the Laetoli footprints (Section 11.10). Scientists have said all of them are morphologically within the modern human range. But instead of taking these fossils as evidence for anatomically modern humans in unexpectedly ancient times, scientists have generally said they show that protohuman creatures such as Australopithecus and Homo habilis had skeletal features resembling those of modern humans. Indeed, most scientists have consistently depicted Australopithecus and Homo habilis as essentially human below their apelike heads. They also say that these creatures were exclusively terrestrial and bipedal in the human fashion. But there is much evidence that this view is mistaken, and that the australopithecines and habilines were very well adapted for life in the trees (Section 11.8).

11.1 Reck’s skeleton

The first significant African discovery related to human origins and antiquity occurred in 1913. In that year, Professor Hans Reck, of Berlin University, conducted investigations at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, then German East Africa. During his stay at Olduvai Gorge, Reck found a human skeleton that would remain a source of controversy for decades.

11.1.1 The Discovery

While one of Reck’s African collectors was searching for fossils on the northern slope of Olduvai Gorge, he spotted a piece of bone sticking up from the earth near a bush (Wendt 1955, p. 418). After clearing away the surface rubble, the collector saw parts of a complete and fully human skeleton embedded in the rock. He summoned Reck, who then had the skeleton taken out in a solid block of hardened sediment. The human skeletal remains, including a complete skull (Figure 11.1), were strongly cemented in the surrounding matrix, which had to be chipped with hammers and chisels (MacCurdy 1924a, p. 423).

Figure 11.1. This skull is from a fully human skeleton found in 1913 by H. Reck at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania (Reck 1933, plate 31).

Reck identified a sequence of five beds at Olduvai Gorge. The first four beds are water-laid volcanic tuffs of various colors. Bed I is grey and yellow. Bed II is generally of a buff color, although the upper portion has a reddish tint. Bed III is bright red, while Bed IV is grey, or brownish. Bed V, a loesslike deposit, is brownish (Hopwood 1932, p. 192).

At the top and base of Bed V are hard whitish layers of a limestonelike deposit of calcrete, or steppe-lime. The sequence of beds (Table 11.1) outlined by Reck is still in use today, except that upper Bed IV is now referred to as the Masek formation and Bed V has been divided into several distinct formations (M. Leakey 1978, p. 3). From oldest to youngest they are the Lower Ndutu, Upper Ndutu, and Naisiusiu formations (Oakley et al. 1977, p. 169).

The skeleton was from the upper part of Bed II. Just below the skeleton were fossils of Elephas antiquus recki (Hopwood 1932, p. 192). To Reck, the faunal evidence indicated the human skeleton was of Middle Pleistocene age, roughly contemporary with Dubois’s Java man, now thought to be about 800,000 years old. Modern dating methods, however, give the uppermost part of Bed II a late Early Pleistocene date of around 1.15 million years (Oakley et al. 1977, p. 166).

The overlying layers were not, however, intact. The skeleton had been found on the side of Olduvai Gorge, about 3 or 4 meters (10 to 13 feet) below the level of the plain (Protsch 1974, p. 379). Here (Figure 11.2) the overlying layers (Beds III, IV, and V) had been worn by erosion. Bed II was, however, still covered by rubble from bright red Bed III and from Bed V (Hopwood 1932, p. 194). It was clear to Louis Leakey (1932b) that perhaps as little as 50 years ago, the site would have been covered by “a small relic of Bed 3 overlain by Bed 5,” the latter containing hard layers of calcrete. Beds III and V were present on the slope just above the spot where the skeleton was found. Bed IV was missing in the immediate area, apparently removed by erosion before the deposition of Bed V.

Reck, understanding the significance of his find, carefully considered the possibility that the human skeleton had arrived in Bed II through burial or earth movements. He determined this was not the case. Reck (1914b) said: “The bed in which the human remains were found, without any accompanying cultural objects, showed no sign of disturbance. The spot appeared exactly like any other in the horizon. There was no evidence of any refilled hole or grave” (Hopwood 1932, p. 193).

Figure 11.2. This section of the northern slope of Olduvai Gorge (after Hopwood 1932, p. 192) shows the location where H. Reck found a fully human skeleton in 1913 in upper Bed II. Bed II is 1.15–1.7 million years old (Oakley et al. 1977, p. 166).

Later, Reck (1926) provided this account: “In some graves, the existence of refilling can be obscured by tamping down the ground and so forth. But artificial disturbance of the strata also results in the mixing together of different kinds of excavated earth. This should be quite evident in the present case. . . . But there was no sign of mixing of earth of different colors, nor were there any fragments of calcrete found mixed into the earth by the skeleton. Nothing of the sort was observed during the inspection of the original site and its surroundings at Olduvai nor in later examination of the matrix in which the skeleton was encased during transport to Germany” (Reck 1926, pp. 85–86; Hopwood 1932, p. 193). According to Reck, the strata at the site had not undergone any geological resorting by which, as Wendt (1955, p. 420) suggested, a recent layer, containing the skeleton, might have been forced into an older one.

In an unpublished manuscript, Reck observed: “The sediment . . . is so constituted that the artificial breaking of the bed with its visible layering by the digging of a grave would necessarily be recognizable.

The wall of the grave would have a definite border, an edge that would show in profile a division from the undisturbed stone. The grave filling would show an abnormal structure and heterogeneous mixture of excavated materials, including easily recognizable pieces of calcrete. Neither of these signs were to be found despite the most attentive inspection. Rather the stone directly around the skeleton was not distinguishable from the neighboring stone in terms of color, hardness, thickness of layers, structure, or order” (Hopwood 1932, pp. 193–194).

In his first report, Reck (1914a) observed: “The skeleton in the grave was complete, though somewhat shifted and compressed [Figure 11.3]. It lay in horizontal position, exactly parallel to the layers of stone in which it was embedded, just

as were all the faunal remains” (Hopwood 1932, p. 193).

Figure 11.3. The skull found by H. Reck in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge was distorted (Reck 1933, plate 30). W. O. Dietrich (1933) believed this distortion argued against the skeleton being a recent shallow burial.

This sheds light on the question of burial. Beds I through IV at Olduvai were laid down by water in a lake bed, producing a distinct sequence of thin layers. Before the deposition of the overlying Ndutu Beds, starting 400,000 years ago (Oakley et al. 1977, p. 166), faulting tilted the Olduvai strata in an east-west direction. If the skeleton had been buried in Bed II fairly recently, it probably would have intersected at an angle the layers of Bed II, here tilted about 7 degrees (Hopwood 1932, p. 192).

The skeleton’s distortion by compression was also significant (Figure 11.3, p. 629). W. O. Dietrich, writing in 1933, stated that this feature of the skeleton argued against its being a recent, shallow burial in the top of Bed II. Its condition indicated a substantial accumulation of sediments had once covered it (Dietrich 1933, pp. 299–303). According to Reck, the deposition of the skeleton took place during the formation of Bed II. Later, the full weight of Beds III and IV would have covered the skeleton. Still later, after the erosion of Bed IV, Beds III and V would have covered the skeleton. All in all, the skeleton’s condition and stratagraphic position appeared to rule out recent burial.

Reck returned to Germany, carrying Olduvai man’s skull with him. He left the rest of the skeleton, encased in a block of Bed II sediment, to be shipped with the expedition’s baggage.

Upon Reck’s return to Germany, his African discovery attracted immediate attention, both in the popular press and in scientific circles. A leading American anthropologist, George Grant MacCurdy (1924a, p. 423) of Yale University, considered Reck’s discovery to be genuine: “The human skeleton . . . came from the next to the lowest horizon (No. 2). . . . The skeleton was found some 3 or 4 meters (10 to 13 feet) below the rim of the Oldoway gorge, which here is about 40 meters [131 feet ] deep. The skeleton bore the same relation to the stratified beds as did the other mammalian remains, and was dug out of the hard clay tufa with hammer and chisel just as these were. In other words, the conditions of the find were such as to exclude the possibility of an interment. The human bones are therefore as old as the deposit (No. 2).” He also agreed that the skeleton was of modern type: “Judging from the photograph of the skeleton still in situ, the man of Oldoway gorge did not belong to the Neandertal, but rather to the Aurignacian type” (MacCurdy 1924a, p. 423). Aurignacian refers to Cro-Magnon man, the first representative of Homo sapiens sapiens in Europe.

11.1.2 Leakey’s conversion

Louis Leakey (1928, p. 499) examined Reck’s skeleton in Berlin, but he initially judged it more recent than Reck had claimed. Other scientists agreed.

In 1931, Leakey and Reck, attempting to settle the issue, visited the site where the skeleton had been found. Along with them were A. T. Hopwood of the British Museum of Natural History, Donald MacInnes, and geologist E. V. Fuchs. After studying the geology, Leakey and Hopwood were won over to Reck’s point of view. Leakey was also influenced by new discoveries of stone implements in Beds I and II of Olduvai Gorge. As we have seen, Reck originally reported that no cultural remains were found in Bed II, a fact that had caused Leakey to judge the skeleton not very old (Goodman 1983, p. 107).

In a letter published in Nature, the prestigious British science review, Leakey, Hopwood, and Reck confirmed that the skeleton was not buried from Bed IV, as Leakey had suggested in his book The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony (1931), but was native to Bed II, as originally reported by Reck. They concluded that the skeletal remains belonged to an anatomically modern Homo sapiens who had lived during Africa’s Upper Kamasian pluvial (rainy) period (L. Leakey et al. 1931), equivalent to the Mindel glacial period of the European middle Middle Pleistocene. This made Reck’s skeleton roughly contemporary with Beijing man and Java man, both from the Middle Pleistocene. But, as previously mentioned, uppermost Bed II at Olduvai Gorge is now given a late Early Pleistocene age of 1.15 million years. By modern accounts, Homo sapiens sapiens is not thought to be more than 100,000 years old, although some specimens regarded as early Homo sapiens are dated at around 300,000 years.

In an article published in the Times of London, Leakey stated that his firsthand research in Africa had established “almost beyond question that the skeleton of a human being found by Professor Reck in 1913 is the oldest authentic skeleton of Homo sapiens” (Goodman 1983, p. 107). This led Leakey to announce that Beijing man and Java man were not direct human ancestors. How could they be, when Reck’s skeleton, fully human, was just as old as they were?

Hopwood later published his own account of the 1931 expedition to Olduvai. Hopwood (1932, p. 193) stated: “Examination of the site in 1931 confirmed the observation that the bed in which the skeleton lay was undoubtedly, Bed II.” Hopwood (1932, p. 194) added: “The slope is covered by rubble from Beds III and V in such a manner that it is difficult to see how a shallow grave could be dug and filled again without including some of this rubble.”

From his study of the stratigraphy and the rate of erosion, Hopwood concluded that as little as 250 years ago “the place where the skeleton lay would certainly have been covered by the lower hard layer [of Bed V calcrete], which is ten to twelve inches thick.” Hopwood pointed out that the calcrete layers at the site were extremely hard. He once saw laborers working with heavy crow bars take two full days to dig a hole just 2 feet square and 3 feet deep through similar material. The nearly impenetrable character of the calcrete appeared to rule out burial (Hopwood 1932, p. 194). Furthermore, the Bed II sediments themselves were quite hard at that point. The skeleton found by Reck in 1913 had to be extracted with hammers and chisels.

After reproducing statements from Reck’s original reports, Hopwood (1932, p. 194) stated: “It is clear that Professor Reck, when he found the skeleton, thought it possible that he might be dealing with an intrusive burial, that he was careful to look for evidence for this, and that he failed to find it.”

Hopwood (1932, p. 195) concluded: “it seems to follow from the original evidence of Professor Reck that the skeleton lay in undisturbed sediment without trace of foreign matter. The ethnological evidence appears to show, that despite physical resemblances, the skeleton is not of the Masai, who inhabit the country today, and that in pre-Masai days the actual part of the bed was in such a position that it was inaccessible to a tribe only with native tools. Hence the conclusion of my colleagues and myself that the skeleton was enclosed in Bed II before that bed was covered by later deposits; and in that sense we regard the skeleton as contemporary with Bed II.”

Around this time, Sir Arthur Keith, who initially thought Reck’s skeleton recent, also adopted the Bed II date. But not everyone agreed with the conclusion that Leakey and Hopwood reached after their 1931 expedition.

11.1.3 Cooper and Watson launch their Attack

In February of 1932, Nature printed a letter by zoologists C. Forster Cooper of Cambridge and D. M. S. Watson of the University of London. They suggested that the completeness of the skeleton found by Reck clearly indicated it was a recent burial (Cooper and Watson 1932a, p. 312).

Cooper and Watson (1932a, p. 312) stated: “Complete mammalian skeletons of any age are, as field palaeontologists know, of great rarity. When they occur, their perfection can usually be explained as the result of sudden death and immediate covering by volcanic dust.” Even here, Cooper and Watson admitted that examples of complete, naturally-deposited skeletons, although rare, do in fact occur. They gave one circumstance for such an occurrence and indicated there might be others.

Cooper and Watson, casting further doubt on the claimed age for Reck’s skeleton, contended that no one had yet found anatomically modern human skeletal remains anywhere near as old. They dismissed the Galley Hill skeleton, claiming it was “never seen in situ by any trained observer” (Cooper and Watson 1932a, p. 312). This is not unreasonable. As far as we can tell, the Galley Hill skeleton could be recent, but there is also evidence suggesting it could be from the middle Middle Pleistocene (Section 6.1.2.1). Cooper and Watson then mentioned the Ipswich skeleton, observing that it had “been withdrawn by its discoverer.” While it is true that J. Reid Moir did change his mind about the age of the Ipswich skeleton, our own study (Section 6.1.3) shows that there is still reason to think it might be from the middle Middle Pleistocene.

Cooper and Watson (1932a, p. 312) then referred obliquely to “other fragments, found long ago . . . entirely without satisfactory evidence as to their mode of occurrence.” They ignored (or were ignorant of) the finds at Castenedolo, Italy (Section 6.2.2). There G. Ragazzoni, a professional geologist, found in situ, in a Pliocene formation, a fairly complete and anatomically modern human skeleton, as well as parts of others.

In May 1932, Leakey replied to Cooper and Watson. In a letter to Nature, he argued that no more than 50 years ago the reddish-yellow upper part of Bed II would have been covered by an intact layer of bright red Bed III. If the skeleton had been buried in recent times (50 or more years ago), there should have been a mixture of bright red and reddish-yellow sediments in the grave filling. Such was not the case. “I was lucky enough personally to examine the skeleton at Munich while it was still intact in its original matrix,” wrote Leakey, “and could detect no trace whatever of such admixture or disturbance.” He added: “The bones of the skeleton . . . are, as far as I know, every bit as mineralized as most of the bones from Bed No. 2 itself” (L. Leakey 1932a, p. 721). This would argue against their being very recent.

Leakey, however, agreed with Cooper and Watson that Reck’s skeleton had arrived in its position in Bed II by burial, but he did not think the burial was recent. “My own personal belief,” wrote Leakey, “is that contemporary man, living on the edge of the then existing Oldoway lake, buried the skeleton into the muddy, clayey edge of the lake whilst Bed No. 2 was in the process of being deposited, for Bed No. 2 is essentially a shallow water deposit at the place where the skeleton was found” (L. Leakey 1932a, p. 721). Reck, on the other hand, believed that the individual had drowned and been covered by sedimentation.

Some scientists had called attention to apparent filing of the teeth of Reck’s skeleton, suggesting this was characteristic of the tribal people inhabiting the region during recent historical times. To this Leakey replied: “I have personally examined the so-called ‘filing’ of the teeth of the Oldoway man on the original specimen at Munich, and this ‘filing’ has no resemblance to any filing done by native tribes to-day, and it is, to my mind, exceedingly doubtful if it can be called filing at all” (L. Leakey 1932a, p. 721).

Leakey then referred to his own finds at Kanam and Kanjera (Section 11.2), which he believed supported the Middle Pleistocene antiquity of Reck’s skeleton. “Actually in situ at a place called Kanam,” stated Leakey, “in the same horizon as the Pre-Chellean tools and the Deinotherium, we found a fragment of a mandible of Homo sapiens type, thus putting Homo sapiens in East Africa back one stage further than Oldoway Man—in fact, in deposits of the same age as Bed No. 1 at Oldoway” (L. Leakey 1932a, p. 722). The upper part of Bed I at Olduvai is now thought to be about 1.7–1.8 million years old (Oakley et al. 1977, p. 166).

About the Kanjera finds, Leakey reported: “We have . . . found fragments of the skulls of three different individuals of Homo sapiens type completely mineralised and just washed out of the exposures by the rains. They are in the same state of complete mineralisation as the remains of Elephas antiquus,

Hipparion, etc., from the same beds, and I have personally no doubt whatever that they were in situ a month or two ago, before the beginning of the present rainy season. These later remains are probably, then, the contemporary of the Oldoway skeleton, and since we have fragments which make up the greater part of the skull cap of one of the [Kanjera] individuals, an interesting comparison will be possible later on” (L. Leakey 1932a, p. 722).

C. Forster Cooper and D. M. S. Watson were still not satisfied. In June 1932, they said in a letter to Nature that red pebbles from Bed III may perhaps have been discolored. “Mere proximity to a large decaying body often alters the character of a matrix,” said Cooper and Watson (1932b). This would explain why Reck and Leakey did not see the Bed III pebbles in the matrix surrounding the skeleton. Hopwood, however, disagreed that Bed III pebbles would have lost their bright red color. He pointed out that the top of Bed II, in which the skeleton was found, was also reddish and stated: “The reddish colour of the matrix is against the theory that any inclusions of Bed III would have been decolorised by decomposition products” (Hopwood 1932, p. 194).

In support of their post-Bed II burial hypothesis, Cooper and Watson offered additional explanations for the absence of Bed III materials in the supposed grave filling. According to Cooper and Watson (1932b), the grave diggers would have taken the red Bed III materials out first and thrown them back in last, on the top. This would explain why no Bed III materials were present in the matrix immediately surrounding the skeleton in Bed II. But this hypothesis depends on a fairly deep grave, with lots of Bed II materials being thrown out of the grave upon the previously removed Bed III materials. This would insure little mixing when the materials were placed back into the grave. But the hardness of the Bed II materials argues against a deep burial. When Reck found the skeleton, it had to be removed with chisels. So if there were a burial, it would most likely have been a shallow one. And in a shallow grave, dug through the rubble of Beds III and V a short distance into Bed II, mixing of materials from Beds II, III, and V would have been hard to avoid in the grave refilling. Since no mixing was visible, there was, all things considered, probably no post-Bed II burial.

Another suggestion—the skeleton was buried horizontally into Bed II, from the side of Olduvai Gorge. Therefore, no Bed III materials were found in the skeleton’s matrix. But Hopwood (1932, p. 194) said: “It would appear that the onus of proof lies on those who might wish to make such a suggestion.” The hardness of Bed II poses a substantial obstacle to horizontal burial.

Furthermore, in an October 1932 letter to Nature, Leakey (1932b) pointed out that the side of the cliff had receded about 2 feet since 1913. At this rate, a few centuries ago the side of the cliff would have been many yards past the present position of the skeleton. So any burial by horizontal tunneling must have taken place fairly recently. And Hopwood (1932, p. 194) noted: “The present inhabitants of the country, the Masai, rarely bury their dead.” And if they did, they did not dig tunnels. Hopwood, describing current Masai burial practices, said: “the shallow grave (about one metre [3 feet] deep) is filled with stones and earth.” The stones are meant “to keep hyaenas from abstracting the body.” Reck’s skeleton was not surrounded by stones.

Leakey’s measurements also showed that since 1913 erosion had lowered the land surface near the skeleton’s resting place by about 6 inches. Repeating a conclusion he had expressed in his May 1932 letter, Leakey said: “my own estimate is that a time less than fifty years before Prof. Reck came to Oldoway, the site where he found the skeleton was covered by a deposit consisting of a very small relic of Bed 3 overlain by Bed 5 and the steppe lime” (L. Leakey 1932b). Therefore, if a burial took place 50 or more years ago, workers would have had to dig through bright red layers of Bed III materials and the hard calcrete layers of Bed V. And neither Leaky nor Reck had seen any materials from Bed III or Bed V present in the skeleton’s matrix.

But Cooper and Watson (1932b) called Leakey’s 50-year estimate “a guess.” They thought it was possible that Bed II could have been exposed for a very much longer time, allowing the skeleton to be buried without the difficulty of digging through the bright red Bed III materials or the hard calcrete layers of Bed V. The longer period of time would also allow for the subsequent fossilization of the skeleton. But the high rate of erosion observed by Leakey did not support the view maintained by Cooper and Watson.

Also, Hopwood (1932, p. 194) observed that Bed II was, at the time the skeleton was excavated, covered with a rubble of Bed III and Bed V materials, along with pieces of steppe lime, or calcrete. So even if the overlying beds were not intact, a very recent burial should nevertheless have caused their loose materials to be mixed in the grave filling.

In his October letter, Leakey responded to criticism of his proposal that Reck’s skeleton had been buried during the formation of Bed II, a shallow Middle Pleistocene lake bottom. Leakey suggested that the deposit might have been dry during parts of the year, as often occurs with African lakes. He also remarked that burial in shallow water is not unknown. “Even to-day in certain circumstances,” he wrote, “some native tribes dispose of the bodies of undesirables, such as suicides, in just such a way, ‘so as to prevent the spirit from escaping’” (L. Leakey 1932b).

Leakey also replied to a suggestion by Cooper and Watson that the Kanam and Kanjera discoveries were irrelevant to the solution of the question of the age of Reck’s skeleton. “I must, however, add,” he wrote, “that I do regard the discovery of the Kanam mandible and Kanjira skulls as relevant to the Oldoway problem, in that they at least show that Homo sapiens was in existence at the time when Bed 2 at Oldoway was being formed” (L. Leakey 1932b, p. 578).

11.1.4 Reck and Leakey change their Minds

Despite the broadsides from Cooper and Watson, Reck and Leakey seemed to be holding their own. But in August 1932, P. G. H. Boswell, a geologist from the Imperial College in England, gave a perplexing report in the pages of Nature.

Professor Mollison had sent to Boswell from Munich a sample of what Mollison said was the matrix surrounding Reck’s skeleton. Mollison, it may be noted, was not a completely neutral party. As early as 1929, he had expressed his belief that the skeleton was that of a Masai tribesman, buried in the not too distant past (Protsch 1974, p. 380).

Boswell (1932, p. 237) stated that the sample supplied by Mollison contained “(a) pea-sized bright red pebbles like those of Bed 3, and (b) chips of concretionary limestone indistinguishable from that of Bed 5 and enclosing at least one mineral (an amphibole), in relative abundance, not found in Beds 2 and 3, but present in Bed 4.” Boswell took all this to mean that the skeleton had been buried after the deposition of Bed V, which is topped by a hard layer of steppelime, or calcrete. At the time he wrote his report, he was unaware that there was also a layer of calcrete at the bottom of Bed V.

The presence of the bright red Bed III pebbles and Bed V limestone chips in the sample sent by Mollison certainly calls for some explanation. Reck and Leakey had both carefully examined the matrix at different times over a period of

20 years. They did not report any mixture of Bed III materials or chips of limestonelike calcrete, even though they were specifically looking for such evidence. So it is remarkable that the presence of red pebbles and limestone chips should suddenly become apparent.

In short, we are faced with contradictory testimony. It would appear that at least one of the participants in the discovery and the subsequent polemics was guilty of extremely careless observation—or cheating.

Reck had studied the matrix at the site. And both Reck and Leakey had studied the matrix directly in contact with the skeleton in Munich. Did they fail to see the red pebbles and chips of limestone, or make false statements about their absence in the matrix? Neither possibility seems likely.

Later, Boswell and other scientists in England studied a sample sent from Munich, in isolation from any of the bones. Mollison, we have already noted, had for years expressed his own view that the skeleton was a recent burial. His statement assuring Boswell that the sample was part “of the material in which the Oldoway skeleton had been embedded” is thus open to question.

Cooper and Watson (1932b) had pointed out in one of their letters to Nature: “The photographs published by Prof. Reck show that the whole of the upper and a good deal of the lateral surfaces of the skeleton were exposed during the excavation made for its removal. . . . It need scarcely be pointed out that the only material certainly of the grave infilling carried to Munich in this way is that which is contained within the ribs and between the limbs and the trunk.” Did Mollison carefully take his sample from within the ribs or between the legs of Reck’s skeleton? Or did he take it from matrix materials that may have come from elsewhere on the block of sediment that contained the skeleton? None of the reports we have seen give any information that would allow these questions to be answered.

Even if the matrix sample supplied by Mollison was suitable for analysis, the presence of limestone chips (containing amphibole) is of ambiguous significance. E. J. Wayland (1932), head of the Geological Survey of Uganda, wrote in a letter to Nature: “The fact that the matrix . . . contained bits of concretionary limestone containing a mineral characteristic of Bed 4 does not prove the burial to be post-Bed 5, for Bed 4 contains concretionary limestone, and for that matter so do the other beds, not excluding Bed 2.”

It seems that Boswell’s mineral test, if accepted at face value, most strongly supports a Bed IV burial. During such a burial, Bed IV limestone chips and bright red Bed III pebbles could have been mixed into Bed II sediments. But a Bed IV burial would still give the anatomically modern skeleton an unexpectedly great age (Table 11.1, p. 629) of 400,000 to 700,000 years.

Keep in mind, however, that Reck, who examined the skeleton in situ, saw no signs of limestone chips or bright red pebbles, although he looked carefully for them. This suggests that no burial activity disturbed any layers of limestonelike calcrete in Beds II, III, IV, or V.

The debate about the age of Reck’s skeleton became more complicated when Leakey brought new soil samples from Olduvai. Boswell and J. D. Solomon studied them at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. They reported their findings in the March 18, 1933 issue of Nature, in a letter signed also by Leakey, Reck, and Hopwood.

The letter contained this very intriguing statement: “Samples of Bed II, actually collected at the ‘man site,’ at the same level and in the immediate vicinity of the place where the skeleton was found consist of pure and wholly typical Bed II material, and differ very markedly from the samples of matrix of the skeleton which were supplied by Prof. Mollison from Munich” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, p. 397). This adds to our suspicion that the matrix sample supplied by Mollison to Boswell may not have been representative of the material closely surrounding Reck’s skeleton.

Reck and Leakey, however, apparently concluded from the new observations that the matrix sample from Reck’s skeleton was in fact some kind of grave filling, different from pure Bed II material. As far as we can tell, they offered no satisfactory explanation for their previous opinion that the skeleton had been found in pure, unmistakable Bed II materials.

Instead, both Reck and Leakey joined Boswell, Hopwood, and Solomon in concluding that “it seems highly probable that the skeleton was intrusive into Bed II and that the date of the intrusion is not earlier than the great unconformity which separates Bed V from the lower series” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, p. 397).

It remains somewhat of a mystery why both Reck and Leakey changed their minds about a Bed II date for Reck’s skeleton. Perhaps Reck was simply tired of fighting an old battle against odds that seemed more and more overwhelming. At the time Reck had discovered his skeleton, many scientists were still somewhat uncertain about the evolutionary status of Dubois’s Middle Pleistocene Java man. This left some room for controversial discoveries such as Reck’s. But by the 1930s, after Black’s discovery of Beijing man, the scientific community had become more uniformly committed to the idea that a transitional ape-man was the only proper inhabitant of the Middle Pleistocene. An anatomically modern Homo sapiens skeleton in Bed II of Olduvai Gorge did not make sense except as a fairly recent burial.

Leakey, almost alone, remained very much opposed to the idea that Java man (Pithecanthropus) and Beijing man (Sinanthropus) were human ancestors. In his discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, he believed he had indisputable evidence for the presence of Homo sapiens in the same period as Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus (and Reck’s skeleton). So perhaps he abandoned the fight over Reck’s highly controversial skeleton in order to strengthen support for his own recent finds at Kanam and Kanjera.

There is substantial circumstantial evidence in support of this hypothesis. In the issue of Nature (March 25, 1933) immediately following the one carrying Leakey’s reversal on Reck’s skeleton (March 18, 1933), there appeared the following notice in Nature’s “News and Views” section: “On March 18–19 a conference summoned by the Royal Anthropological Institute met at St. John’s College, Cambridge, under the presidency of Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, to receive reports on the human skeletal remains discovered by Dr. Leakey’s archaeological expedition to East Africa in the autumn of last year.” We shall discuss the conference report later in this chapter (Section 11.2.3). For now, we simply note that Leakey’s statement abandoning his previous position on the antiquity of Reck’s skeleton appeared in Nature on the same day as the opening of a conference that would bear heavily on his reputation as a scientist.

In the March 18 issue of Nature, C. Stanton Hicks, of the University of Adelaide, Australia, complained about the disadvantages of practicing science in the outlying regions of the British Empire: “The old-established scientific societies with all their tradition and prestige, their facilities for publication and criticism of original work, and their influence in paving the way to higher posts, are in Great Britain.” Leakey was a colonial, born and raised in British East Africa. In the conference convened to review his discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, this promising young scientist’s fate hung in the balance. He would perhaps be accepted into the elite circles of British science, and given a post at Cambridge, or perhaps be banished into obscurity, lucky to occupy a professorship in an outlying university. It is quite possible Leakey thought it best to withdraw his reputation from somebody else’s controversial fossil and thus pave the way for acceptance of his own better-dated finds at Kanam and Kanjera. After all, some of the most vocal opponents of Reck’s skeleton, such as Boswell, Solomon, Cooper, Watson, and Mollison, would be sitting on the committee that would review the Kanam jaw and Kanjera skulls. As we shall see, the committee accepted the Kanam and Kanjera finds.

In his memoirs, Louis Leakey (1972, pp. 37–38) gave a brief and somewhat confusing review of his involvement with Reck’s skeleton. He said the debate about the skeleton’s age was resolved by a mineral analysis conducted by Boswell after a 1935 visit to Olduvai Gorge. This version is repeated, almost verbatim, in Cole’s 1975 biography of Leakey. But, as far as we can tell, Boswell’s mineral analysis was performed in 1933, and the results were reported in the March 18, 1933 letter to Nature, signed by Boswell, Leakey, Reck, Hopwood, and Solomon.

According to the new view outlined in the March 1933 letter, intact Beds III and IV at Olduvai Gorge were stripped away by erosion at the location of the skeleton. Bed II, thus exposed, would have probably still been covered by some remnants of Bed III and perhaps a thin layer of calcrete, or steppe-lime. The burial supposedly took place at this time. Subsequent to the burial, the layers of Bed V, including thick, hard layers of calcrete, were deposited. The authors of the March 1933 letter said: “it seems certain that the skeleton was deposited where it was found before the main mass of Bed V, and the overlying steppe-lime were formed, that is, the skeleton appears to have been buried at the time of the existence of the old land surface connected with the steppe-lime at the base of Bed V” (L. Leakey et al. 1933, pp. 397–398).

This still gives a potentially anomalous age for the fully human Reck’s skeleton. The base of Bed V is about 400,000 years old, according to current estimates (Table 11.1, p. 629). Therefore, even according to the revised position taken by Reck and Leakey, the skeleton could be at least 400,000 years old. This is true even if, as Boswell claimed in his August 1932 letter, the matrix sample supplied by Mollison contained deep red pebbles like those of Bed III and pieces of steppe-lime with a mineral characteristic of Bed IV. Today, however, most scientists believe that Homo sapiens sapiens first appeared about 100,000 years ago, as shown by the Border Cave discoveries in South Africa.

The March 1933 letter to Nature concluded with some interesting observations about stone tools found “in the basal deposits of Bed V” and on an “old land surface” at the same level as the steppe-lime just below Bed V. These tools, said the authors, had “very close affinities with the phase C of the Upper Kenyan Aurignacian” (Leakey et al. 1933, p. 398). Archeologists first used the term Aurignacian in connection with the finely-made artifacts of Cro-Magnon man (Homo sapiens sapiens) found at Aurignac, France. According to standard opinion, tools of the Aurignacian type did not appear before 30,000 years ago.

The Kenyan Aurignacian is now called the Kenyan Capsian, and the industry referred to above is called Upper Kenyan Capsian C. An Upper Kenyan Capsian C industry is found at Gamble’s Cave, Kenya. Gamble’s Cave is considered Holocene, or less than 10,000 years old (Oakley et al. 1977, pp. 36–37).

The presence of tools characteristic of anatomically modern humans just below Bed V and in the basal layers of Bed V at Olduvai Gorge is significant. The tools lend support to the idea that anatomically modern humans, as represented by Reck’s skeleton, were present in this part of Africa at least 400,000 years ago. Alternatively, one could attribute the tools to Homo erectus. But this would mean granting to Homo erectus toolmaking abilities substantially greater than scientists currently accept.

In The Stone Age Races of Kenya (1935), Leakey repeated his view that Reck’s skeleton had been buried into Bed II from a land surface that existed during the formation of Bed V. But now he favored a time much later in that period, contemporary with the Upper Kenyan Capsian C industry at Gamble’s Cave. Rainer Protsch (1974, p. 382) wrote: “The contemporaneity was not based on association of the hominids in both localities with that culture, but on the association of one with that culture [at Gamble’s Cave] and similar physical types of the hominids in both sites.” In our discussion of discoveries made in China, we examined the practice of morphological dating. Here again we see the primary role that the morphology of a skeleton plays in assigning it a date. And Leakey was not alone. Concerning the dating of Reck’s skeleton, Protsch (1974, p. 382) noted: “Weinert [1934] argued against an early age of these Homo sapiens remains from a purely theoretical evolutionary point of view.”

In 1971, Mary Leakey repeated the position taken by her husband in The Stone Age Races of Kenya: “The skull is of Homo sapiens type and resembles those of the Kenya Capsian from Gamble’s Cave II and Naivasha Railway Rockshelter in Kenya. A living site with a microlithic industry dated about 10,000 b.p. is known to exist within a short distance of the Olduvai burial and it is possible that the two are associated” (M. Leakey 1971, p. 225).

But even if the hypothesis that the skeleton was buried into Bed II during the deposition of Bed V is accepted, the skeleton could still be up to 400,000 years old. As mentioned above, that is when the post-Bed IV sediments began to accumulate at Olduvai. Other than its anatomically modern character, the Leakeys had little justification for assigning Reck’s skeleton to recent rather than earlier Bed V times.

11.1.5 The Radiocarbon Dating of Reck’s skeleton

Reiner Protsch later attempted to remedy this situation by dating Reck’s skeleton itself. Without such a determination, all that could truthfully be said (granting the Bed V burial hypothesis) was that the skeleton could be anywhere from 400,000 to perhaps a few thousand years old.

In 1929, Mollison had measured the organic content of Reck’s skeleton under ultraviolet light, hoping to gain insight into its age. Sonia Cole (1975, p. 93), Leakey’s biographer, said: “he found a great contrast between it and very recent bones on the one hand and the fossil fauna from Olduvai Bed II on the other.” According to Cole, the differences in organic content indicated to Mollison that the bones were of different ages. In particular, Reck’s skeleton would have to be younger than the other fossils found in Bed II. Mollison’s ultraviolet measurements are said to have substantially influenced Leakey to change his mind about the antiquity of Reck’s skeleton (Cole 1975, p. 93).

But Protsch contradicted Cole’s statement, quoted above, that Mollison had found the organic content of Reck’s skeleton to be different from that of the fauna from Bed II. Protsch (1974, p. 380) said Mollison had found “identical results for the organic content of the hominid and the fauna of Bed II.” This demonstrates the difficulties one encounters in trying to unravel the truth about a case like this.

According to Protsch (1974, p. 380), Mollison obtained an organic content of 4.8 percent for the Olduvai human skeleton and 5.3 percent for a skull, only a few thousand years old, from the Ofnet Cave in Bavaria. Mollison used this determination to assign a date of approximately five thousand years to the Olduvai skeleton. Protsch later ran his own tests, using modern microanalytical methods to measure the amount of collagen, the main organic constituent of bone. He obtained an organic content of 2.7 percent for Reck’s skeleton and

16.56 percent for the Bavarian skull. This invalidated the earlier determination by Mollison. Not much can be read into either set of results, because bones from different locations can lose their organic content at greatly different rates (Appendix 1.1).

Eventually, fragments of bone thought to belong to the original skeleton were dated by the radiocarbon method. Protsch (1974) obtained for his sample an age of 16,920 years.

The skull was considered too valuable to use for testing, and the rest of the skeleton had disappeared from a Munich museum during the Second World War. Protsch (1974, p. 383) stated: “Through the courtesy of G. Glowatzki, director of the Staatssammlung, some very fragmentary postcranial material still imbedded in earth was found and used for radiocarbon dating. This material consisted mainly of rib fragments, long bone fragments, and pieces of vertebrae. Some of the bones were covered by the preservative Sapon, a lacquer, which was easily flaked off and removed. Many parts were not covered by this preservative, but nevertheless the same chemical pretreatment was given to all bone material. This postcranial material most likely belongs to the Olduvai Hominid I since it was marked as such.”

But if the bones were “still embedded in earth,” how did they become fragmented? The original skeleton was said to be intact. Also, the hard Bed II material in which the skeleton was encased upon arrival in Germany was not exactly “earth.” Reports of the discovery say the skeleton had to be removed with hammers and chisels, indicating the matrix was stonelike in hardness.

From the bone fragments available to him, Protsch was able to gather a sample of only 224 grams, about one third the normal size of a test sample for the method he used. Although he obtained an age of 16,920 years for the human bone, he apparently got very much different dates from other materials from the same site. “Several other radiocarbon dates were run, but could be contaminated by either recent or old radiocarbon, since these sample materials were mostly calcrete or fresh water shells,” said Protsch (1974, p. 384). But the human fossil material may also have been contaminated by recent radiocarbon.

In Appendix 1, we discuss in detail the difficulties involved in radiocarbon dating of bones that have been exposed to contamination. By 1974, the remaining bone fragments from Reck’s skeleton, if they in fact belonged to Reck’s skeleton, had been lying around in a museum for over 60 years and had been soaked in an organic preservative (Sapon).

Protsch did not describe what chemical treatment he used to eliminate recent carbon 14 contributed by the Sapon. Thus we have no way of knowing to what degree the contamination from this source was eliminated.

In Appendix 1.3.2, we also describe other sources of contamination, including: (1) saprophytes growing in and feeding on bone, (2) humic and fulvic acids, (3) exogenous amino acids, (4) improper collection procedures. Protsch (1974) did not discuss any of these sources of contamination or what procedures he used to try to eliminate them. All of these sources of contamination, if not properly dealt with, would cause the carbon 14 test to yield a falsely young age.

The procedures employed today (Appendix 1.3.2.1) are much more exacting than those used by the radiocarbon laboratories that dated Reck’s skeleton in the early 1970s.

The radiocarbon method is applied only to the collagen, or protein, fraction of the bone. This protein must be extracted from the rest of the bone by an extremely rigorous purification process.

Scientists then determine whether a sample’s amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) correspond to those found in collagen. If they do not correspond, this suggests that amino acids may have entered the bone from outside. According to Jeffrey Bada (1985a, pp. 256–257), who conducted extensive research at Olduvai Gorge, bones can absorb amino acids from groundwater. These amino acids, being of a different age than the bone, could yield a falsely young radiocarbon date.

Even though a bone has a noncollagen profile, the amino acids could still be original to the bone (the collagen could have decayed, leaving only some of its constituent amino acids). In all cases, one should therefore date each amino acid separately. If any of the amino acids yield dates different from any of the others, this suggests the bone is contaminated and not suitable for carbon 14 dating.

Concerning the radiocarbon tests on Reck’s skeleton reported by Protsch, the laboratories that performed them could not have dated each amino acid separately. This requires a dating technique (accelerator mass spectrometry) that was not in use in the early 1970s. Neither could these labs have been aware of the stringent protein purification techniques now deemed necessary.

Is it fair to subject Protsch’s dating of Reck’s skeleton to such retrospective criticism? After all, the requirements we are talking about were not in effect then. But if modern authorities are correct, and the rigorous purification and dating procedures outlined in Appendix 1.3.2.1 are actually necessary, then it is not unfair to measure Protsch’s study against these standards. And when we do so, we can only conclude that the radiocarbon date Protsch gave for Reck’s skeleton is unreliable. In particular, the date could very well be falsely young.

There are documented cases of bones from Olduvai Gorge giving falsely young radiocarbon dates. For example, a bone from the Upper Ndutu beds yielded an age of 3,340 years. The Upper Ndutu beds, part of what used to be called Bed V, are from 32,000 to 60,000 years old. A date of 3,340 years would thus be too young by at least a factor of ten. Bada (1985a, p. 255) attributed the unexpectedly young radiocarbon date to deterioration of the bone’s original collagen and contamination by secondary carbon compounds from the ground. The radiocarbon dating of Reck’s skeleton is thus questionable.

From his radiocarbon date of 16,920 years, Protsch came to the conclusion that the skeleton had been buried in Bed II during the deposition of the upper part of Bed V, which formed after Beds III and IV had been eroded (Protsch 1974, p. 384). Uppermost Bed V, now called the Naisiusiu formation, also yielded fossil material (an ostrich egg shell) with a radiocarbon date of approximately 17,000 years.

Nevertheless, burial from upper Bed V times still seems somewhat problematic. From the reports of Leakey, Hopwood, and others, it is apparent that as little as a few hundred years ago, the spot where Reck’s skeleton was found would have been covered by intact Bed V. How much of Bed V is hard to tell, but Louis Leakey (1932b) reported that between 1913 and 1931 the land surface at the site had eroded 6 inches. And at the base Bed V there would have been a hard layer of calcrete, 10 to 12 inches thick.

Furthermore, Bed II itself was quite hard. According to the original reports of the excavation, Reck’s skeleton had to be taken out with the aid of hammers and chisels. It hardly seems likely that primitive tribal people would have engaged in the arduous efforts necessary to dig a grave in such resistant rock. One way around this difficulty is to suppose, contrary to the geological evidence, that 17,000 years ago the Bed V calcrete was not present and that the Bed II sediments were still soft a million years after they were deposited—a highly improbable scenario.

Protsch also reported uranium content test results of 3 parts per million for both some middle Bed V faunal remains and Reck’s skeleton (now called Olduvai Hominid 1). But he correctly pointed out that the specimens were from different localities, which reduces the value of the comparison. Uranium isotopes may accumulate at vastly different rates in different localities (Protsch 1974, p. 384).

Protsch (1974, pp. 382–383) said stone tools had been discovered in the Naisiusiu Beds, corresponding to the upper part of the old Bed V ( Table 11.1, p. 629). These were somewhat like those found at Gamble’s Cave (Upper Kenyan Capsian C), some distance away from Olduvai. At Gamble’s Cave, skeletons of Homo sapiens sapiens had been found, like Reck’s skeleton, in a contracted burial position (Protsch 1974, p. 381). Protsch thought these facts lent support to a Naisiusiu Bed origin for Reck’s skeleton. But in 1933, Louis Leakey had said that stone tools of the Upper Kenyan Capsian C type had been found just below and in the basal layers of Bed V (L. Leakey et al. 1933, p. 398). This could be taken as evidence that men like those of Gamble’s Cave (Homo sapiens sapiens) existed at least 400,000 years ago in this part of Africa.

But Protsch (1974, p. 382) said about Reck’s skeleton: “Theoretically, several facts speak against an early age of the hominid, such as its morphology.” This suggests that the skeleton’s modern morphology was one of the main reasons Protsch doubted it was as old as Bed II or even the base of Bed V.

If Reck’s skeleton were classified as Homo erectus, it is hard to imagine that anyone would now be raising any serious objections to its presence in Bed II. In 1960, a Homo erectus cranium (OH 9) was found on the surface at Olduvai Gorge (Poirier 1977, p. 223). It was nevertheless assigned to upper Bed II, giving it an age of over 1 million years. Adhering to the base of the cranium was a matrix matching that of Bed II. Yet a determined debunker could always attribute this to “secondary cementation.”

What about the observations by Leakey (1932a, p. 721) and Mollison (Protsch 1974, p. 380) that the human bones are fossilized to the same degree as the animal bones found nearby in Bed II? Protsch (1974, p. 382) said that “a relative age determined by the state of fossilization of bones is invalid for a positive chronological diagnosis.” Here, we agree with Protsch.

Yet scientists have used such determinations of relative age, as measured by differences in fluorine, uranium, or nitrogen content, to discredit many of the anomalously old Homo sapiens fossils we have discussed (such as Galley Hill). They also have used relative age determinations to date many accepted finds. But in the case of Reck’s skeleton, Protsch said such results have no value.

Curiously enough, Protsch himself used a relative age determination to confirm that the bone fragments he had tested were actually from Reck’s skeleton. Protsch (1974, p. 383) reported: “to check whether the skull and the fragmentary bones belonged together, two separate microanalytical tests were made on the skull and some post cranial primary bone. The [nitrogen] values of 0.45% (British Museum) and 0.43% (UCLA) are remarkably similar and give support to a positive association of the bones.” So to be fair, if the Bed II faunal remains and Reck’s skeleton were fossilized to a similar degree (Leakey 1932a, p. 721), could not this also be taken as supporting (although not proving) a “positive association of the bones?”

All in all, Protsch appears to have done a needed service—the cleaning up of a problem discovery, fitting it nicely into the accepted evolutionary sequence. By 1974, it is clear, no one in the mainstream of human evolutionary thought was prepared to accept a fully modern human being existing at least 400,000 years ago, contemporary with Homo erectus. Protsch himself admitted that his theoretical expectations ruled this out. By giving a plausible carbon 14 date and identifying the skeleton with tools found nearby in upper Bed V and with skeletal remains found at Gamble’s Cave along with similar tools, Protsch put Reck’s skeleton in an appropriate paleoanthropological niche. The case was closed.

But the case made by Protsch in favor of a Late Pleistocene burial was very weak. First of all, it is not at all certain that the bone sample he tested actually belonged to the original Reck’s skeleton, which, except for the skull, disappeared during the Second World War. Furthermore, the carbon 14 method is not infallible, especially when applied to bones that were exposed to contamination for over

60 years. It is also possible that the bones were contaminated with recent carbon while they were buried in the ground at Olduvai Gorge. And, as we have seen, the radiocarbon dating methods employed by Protsch have been superseded by more rigorous procedures.

11.1.6 Probable Date Range of Reck’s skeleton

We are now left with several alternative explanations, which we shall now summarize, for the age of Reck’s skeleton. First we have the original determination by Reck that it was deposited naturally during the formation of Bed II. Reck carefully searched for signs of intrusive burial (especially chips of limestone and other materials from the overlying beds) and found none “despite the most attentive inspection” (Hopwood 1932, pp. 193–194). This gives a date of over 1.15 million years for the skeleton, which is fully human. Second, we have Leakey’s view that the skeleton was deliberately buried during the deposition of upper Bed II, which also gives a date of over 1.15 million years. Third, we have the revised position, taken by Reck, Leakey, and others, that the skeleton was buried into Bed II during the time Bed V was being deposited. In adopting their revised position, Reck and Leakey in effect reversed their previous statements that they had observed no mixture of materials from overlying beds in the matrix of the skeleton. It is significant that Leakey recanted his position on Reck’s skeleton just before a commission of scientists, including the critics of his prior views on Reck’s skeleton, was to pass judgement on his own discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera. The new position adopted by Reck, Leakey, and others yields a date range of from 400,000 to perhaps 10,000 years for the skeleton. Primarily on the basis of its modern morphology, the skeleton was assigned a very recent date within this range. During the Second World War, much of the skeleton was lost. Finally, in 1974, in an attempt to confirm an uppermost Bed V date, Protsch published a radiocarbon test result of about 17,000 years for a bone sample that may not have been from the original Reck skeleton. Even if the sample was from Reck’s skeleton, the dating techniques that were used are now considered unreliable.

In our discussion of China, we introduced the concept of a probable date range (Section 9.2.1) as the fairest age indicator for controversial discoveries. The available evidence suggests that Reck’s skeleton (OH 1) should be assigned a probable date range extending from the late Early Pleistocene (1.15 million years) to the late Upper Pleistocene (10,000 years). There is much evidence that argues in favor of the original Bed II date proposed by Reck. Particularly strong is Reck’s observation that the thin layers of Bed II sediment directly around the skeleton were undisturbed. Also arguing against later burial is the rocklike hardness of Bed II. Reports favoring a Bed V date seem to be founded upon purely theoretical objections, dubious testimony, inconclusive test results, and highly speculative geological reasoning. But even these reports yield dates of up to

400,000 years for the skeleton.

A skeleton of Homo sapiens sapiens type with an age of 1.15 million years, or even .4 million years, does not fit the current evolutionary scenario. But Reck’s skeleton does not seem out of place when seen in the context of the evidence documented in this book. This evidence demonstrates the presence of anatomically modern humans throughout the Early Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, and even earlier. Only the radiocarbon date reported by Protsch suggests Reck’s skeleton might be fairly recent, but as we have seen, this date has its problems.

It would undoubtedly take a time-traveling detective with supersensory powers to give us the real story of Reck’s skeleton and its age. And Reck’s skeleton is not exceptional. Most of the discoveries scientists have used to build up their picture of human evolution are similarly ambiguous, their significance obscured by professional rivalries and imperfect investigative methods.

11.2 The Kanjera Skulls and Kanam Jaw

In 1932, Louis Leakey announced discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera, near Lake Victoria in western Kenya. The Kanam jaw and Kanjera skulls, he believed, provided good evidence of Homo sapiens in the Early and Middle Pleistocene.

11.2.1 Discovery of the kanjera skulls

Kanjera lies on the south shore of Lake Victoria’s Kavirondo Gulf. When Leakey visited Kanjera in 1932 with Donald MacInnes, they found stone hand axes and fragments of five human skulls, designated Kanjera 1–5. Leakey (1960d, p. 204) said: “I found part of No. 3 specimen in situ myself, and I have no doubt about its genuineness.” The expedition also found a human femur.

According to Leakey, the fossil-bearing beds at Kanjera were equivalent to Bed IV at Olduvai Gorge. The faunal studies of H. B. S. Cooke (1963) confirmed this, which means the Kanjera beds range from 400,000 to 700,000 years old (Table 11.1, p. 629). But the morphology of the Kanjera skull pieces was quite modern. Leakey (1960d, p. 203) wrote: “The front part of the skull is preserved, in a damaged condition, in two of the specimens, and from this we can see that there was no trace of a bony brow-ridge above the eyes. Instead we find a very small and simple form much as in a child, but certainly of Homo sapiens type.” Scientists now think modern Homo sapiens appeared about 100,000 years ago in Africa. An age of 400,000 years for the Kanjera skulls would, however, be acceptable for the oldest African early Homo sapiens (Bräuer 1984, p. 394). But the author of a recent survey attributed the Kanjera skulls to Homo sapiens cf. sapiens (Groves 1989, p. 291), indicating they are anatomically modern.

11.2.2 Discovery of the kanam jaw

At Kanam, Leakey initially found teeth of Mastodon and a single tooth of Deinotherium (an extinct elephantlike mammal), as well as some crude stone implements. Because Deinotherium was the marker fossil for Bed I at Olduvai Gorge, Leakey believed the Kanam formations were of the same Early Pleistocene age—about 1.7–2.0 million years old, according to current estimates (Oakley et al. 1977, pp. 166, 169).

On March 29, 1932, Leakey’s collector, Juma Gitau, brought him a second in the same spot. Working a few yards from Leakey, Gitau hacked out a block of travertine (a hard calcium carbonate deposit) and broke it open with a pick. He saw a tooth protruding from a piece of travertine and showed it to MacInnes, who identified the tooth as human. MacInnes summoned Leakey. Together they searched for more human fossils, but none turned up (L. Leakey 1960d, p. 202).

Upon chipping away the travertine surrounding Gitau’s find, they saw the front part of a human lower jaw with two premolars. Leakey thought the jaw from the Early Pleistocene Kanam formation was much like that of Homo sapiens, and he announced its discovery in a letter to Nature (Cole 1975, p. 91). According to Cooke (1963), the Kanam fauna is older than that of Bed I at Olduvai Gorge, making the Kanam beds at least 2.0 million years old.

Almost without exception, today’s scientists believe that the human lineage extends from Australopithecus in the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, to Homo erectus in the Early and Middle Pleistocene, and thence to Homo sapiens sapiens in the Late Pleistocene. Against this background, a Homo sapiens jaw in the earliest Pleistocene seems strangely out of place. But in the early 1930s, the now dominant view of human origins, although held by some, was still a somewhat tentative hypothesis. A good many British scientists regarded Australopithecus, discovered in 1925 by Raymond Dart in South Africa, as a variety of ape, with no direct connection to the line of human descent. Similarly, many scientists never accepted Java man, and Beijing man had only newly arrived on the scene. Although some scientists did believe Java man and Beijing man, now classified as Homo erectus, were genuine human ancestors, the picture was somewhat clouded by Piltdown man. Whereas Java man and Beijing man had humanlike jaws and apelike skulls, Piltdown man, roughly the same age, featured an apelike jaw and humanlike skull. The Neanderthals also had to be fit into the picture. Some thought they were direct human ancestors, others thought they were on an evolutionary side branch. In short, scientists of the 1930s held varying views about the progress of human evolution and the antiquity of the modern human type. Therefore, not all of them would automatically reject finds such as Leakey made at Kanam and Kanjera.

For Leakey, the Kanam and Kanjera fossils showed that a hominid close to the modern human type had existed at the time of Java man and Beijing man, or even earlier. If he was correct, Java man and Beijing man (now Homo erectus) could not be direct human ancestors, nor could Piltdown man with his apelike jaw.

11.2.3 A commission of scientists Decides on kanam and kanjera

On March 18 and March 19, 1933, the human biology section of the Royal Anthropological Institute met to consider Leakey’s discoveries at Kanam and Kanjera. Chaired by Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, 28 scientists issued reports on four categories of evidence: geological, paleontological, anatomical, and archeological (Woodward et al. 1933, pp. 477– 478). The geology committee concluded that the Kanjera and Kanam human fossils were native to the beds in which they were found. The paleontology committee said the Kanam beds were Early Pleistocene, while the Kanjera beds were no more recent than Middle Pleistocene. The archeology committee noted the presence at both Kanam and Kanjera of stone tools in the same beds where the human fossils had been found.

The anatomical committee said the Kanjera skulls exhibited “no characteristics inconsistent with the reference to the type Homo sapiens ( Woodward et al. 1933, p. 477). The same was true of the Kanjera femur.

About the Kanam jaw, the anatomy experts said: “With the possible exceptions of the thickness of the symphysis, the conformation of the anterior internal surface, and what seems to be a large pulp-cavity of the first right molar tooth, the Committee is not able to point to any detail of the specimen that is incompatible with its inclusion in the type of the Homo sapiens” ( Woodward et al. 1933, p. 478). The symphysis, the joint between the two halves of the lower jaw, runs down the middle of front part of the jaw.

The species designation Homo sapiens, as employed today by most, although not all, paleoanthropologists, includes early Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens sapiens (fully modern humans). But in 1933, the Neanderthals were generally considered distinct from Homo sapiens, and the first representatives of early Homo sapiens, as presently conceived by many workers, either had not been discovered or had not been reported to the scientific world. The first report on the Steinheim skull, discovered in 1933, came out in 1935. And the Swanscombe skull fragments were not found until 1935 and 1936. So when the members of the anatomical committee classed the Kanjera skulls and Kanam jaw as Homo sapiens, they presumably meant they were within the range of anatomically modern humans.

Although the committee stated that the remains could be classified as Homo sapiens, Leakey assigned the jaw to a new species, Homo kanamensis, which he considered the immediate ancestor of Homo sapiens. According to Cole (1975, pp. 103–104), Leakey later dropped the name kanamensis in favor of sapiens.

11.2.4 Boswell strikes Again

Shortly after the 1933 conference gave Leakey its vote of confidence, geologist Percy Boswell began to question the age of the Kanam and Kanjera fossils. Leakey, who had experienced Boswell’s attacks on the age of Reck’s skeleton, decided to bring Boswell to Africa, hoping this would resolve his doubts. But all did not go well.

Upon returning to England, Boswell (1935) submitted to Nature a negative report on Kanam and Kanjera: “Unfortunately, it has not proved possible to find the exact site of either discovery, since the earlier expedition (of

1931–32) neither marked the localities on the ground nor recorded the sites on a map. Moreover, the photograph of the site where the mandible was found, exhibited with the jaw fragment at the Royal College of Surgeons, was, through some error, that of a different locality.” Having examined Leakey’s original field notes, Boswell (1935) said “it is regrettable that the records are not more precise.”

Boswell found the geological conditions at the sites confused. He said that “the clayey beds found there had frequently suffered much disturbance by slumping.” From this Boswell (1935) concluded: “The date of entombment of human remains found in such beds would be inherently doubtful.”

But what about the committee that had given Leakey its endorsement? “It seems likely,” said Boswell (1935) “that if the facts now brought forward had been available to the Committee, a different report would have been submitted.” Boswell concluded that the “uncertain conditions of discovery . . . force me to place Kanam and Kanjera man in a ‘suspense account.’”

11.2.5 Leakey Responds

Replying to Boswell’s charge that he had not properly marked the sites, Leakey (1936) stated in a letter to Nature that he had in fact done so. Unfortunately, the iron pegs he used had disappeared, perhaps taken by natives for spearheads or fishhooks. He had not marked the sites on a map, but only because no maps of sufficient detail existed. He had considered hiring a surveyor to make maps, but had not done so because of lack of money. Instead, he had taken photographs to identify the sites, but these had been spoiled by a malfunction in his camera.

His own photographs of Kanam and Kanjera ruined, Leakey had selected some by Miss Kendrick, a member of his expedition, to display with his fossils in England. In his letter to Nature, Leakey explained he had misinterpreted the label on one of Kendrick’s photographs and had mistakenly used it to show the site where the Kanam jaw had been found. But he pointed out: “I carefully refrained from using any photographs as evidence in connexion with my claim for the antiquity of the Kanam mandible, and only used them to show the general nature of the sites” (L. Leakey 1936).

Furthermore, Leakey felt he had been able to show Boswell the locations where he had found his fossils. Leakey (1936) wrote: “At Kanjera I showed him the exact spot where the residual mound of deposits had stood which yielded the Kanjera No. 3 skull in situ. . . . the fact that I did show Prof. Boswell the site is proved by a small fragment of bone picked up there in 1935 which fits one of the 1932 pieces.”

Regarding the Kanam jaw, Leakey stated in his memoirs: “It had been found in direct association with Lower Pleistocene fossils such as Deinotherium and Mastodon, and the matrix adhering to it was entirely similar to that which Boswell had now seen in the Kanam West gullies” (L. Leakey 1972, p. 35). Boswell did not mention the matrix adhering to the jaw in his letter to Nature.

Leakey (1972, p. 35) added: “Boswell, however, remained doubtful because no scientist had seen the jaw in situ. He would not agree to accept Juma’s statement that it had been dug out while he was working on the Deinotherium tooth.” Of course, if this standard were to be applied across the board, then many thoroughly accepted discoveries would also have to be thrown out. The Heidelberg (Mauer) jaw, for example, was discovered by a German sand pit worker. And almost all of the Java man discoveries reported by von Koenigswald were found by native collectors.

Regarding the location of the Kanam jaw, Leakey (1972, p. 35) said: “we had originally taken a level section right across the Kanam West gullies, using a Zeiss-Watts level, and could therefore locate the position to within a very few feet—and, in fact, we did so. I had brought with me a copy of the cross section, taken from a tree that could still be located on one side of the gully to another tree on the other side. On this cross section was a mark showing the point where the jaw had been recovered. I had, therefore, no doubt at all that I was showing Boswell and Wayland the right place within a few feet.”

Boswell suggested that even if the jaw was found in the Early Pleistocene formation at Kanam, it had entered somehow from above—by “slumping” of the strata or through a fissure. To this Leakey (1960d, pp. 202–203) later replied: “I cannot accept this interpretation, for which there is no evidence. The state of preservation of the fossil is in every respect identical to that of the Lower Pleistocene fossils found with it. Had the Kanam mandible been a specimen representing some specialized extinct type of man (such as used to be called ‘primitive’) no one would have suggested that it was not contemporary with the other fossils of the same horizon. . . . the fact that the Kanam mandible has a distinct chin eminence certainly influenced some people against accepting its authenticity.”

Boswell’s preconceptions about the morphology of hominids in the Early Pleistocene apparently motivated his attacks on the age of the Kanam jaw, and of Reck’s skeleton (Section 11.1.4). Leakey (1972, pp. 35–36) said in his memoirs: “he actually told us that were it not for the counterindication provided by the Piltdown jaw, which showed that man in the Lower Pleistocene had a simian shelf and extremely apelike characteristics, he would be inclined to accept the Kanam evidence, since the mineralization of the specimen compared closely with that of other fossils from the same deposits.” Of course, British scientists later declared the Piltdown jaw to be a fake (Chapter 8).

11.2.6 Kanam and Kanjera after Boswell

Despite Boswell’s attacks on the Kanam and Kanjera finds, a few well-known scientists continued to keep open minds about Leakey’s original claims. Robert Broom, who in the 1930s found the first adult specimens of Australopithecus, wrote (1951, p. 13): “I have looked into this controversy very carefully and have no hesitation in saying that I have the fullest confidence in Leakey’s work; I am quite satisfied that Leakey found these remains where he says he found them, and that they prove modern man is far older than a few English scientists had thought—perhaps even as old as the Lowest Pleistocene.” Broom’s use of the words “modern man” to describe the Kanam and Kanjera fossils suggests he regarded them as similar to Homo sapiens sapiens. Broom (1951, pp. 11–12) characterized the Kanjera fossils as “skulls of early man with a large brain, and without any of the characters of Neanderthal man.” Standard texts give a lot of attention to Broom’s Australopithecus finds, but usually fail to mention his unorthodox views on Kanam and Kanjera.

Philip V. Tobias of South Africa said about Kanjera (1968, p. 182): “Boswell did not disprove the claim that human fragments were found in a Middle Pleistocene deposit; he only failed to find additional evidence confirmatory of Leakey’s claim. Thus there is a good prima facie case to re-open the question of Kanjera.”

And the Kanjera case was in fact reopened. Leakey’s biographer Sonia Cole (1975, p. 358) wrote: “In September 1969 Louis attended a conference in Paris sponsored by UNESCO on the theme of the origins of Homo sapiens. . . . the 300 or so delegates unanimously accepted that the Kanjera skulls were Middle Pleistocene.”

Leakey originally suggested that the fossil-bearing formation at Kanjera was equivalent to Olduvai Bed IV, which is approximately 400,000 to 700,000 years old (early to middle Middle Pleistocene). By 1960, however, Leakey had modified his position. He said the Kanjera skulls were the same age as the Swanscombe skull (L. Leakey 1960d, p. 204), which is about 300,000 years old. In the paper Leakey presented at the UNESCO conference, he maintained his view that the deposits at Kanjera and Swanscombe were “of comparable age.” But as we have seen, H. B. S. Cooke (1963), a leading authority on African mammals, confirmed Leakey’s original view that the Kanjera beds were the same age as Olduvai Bed IV. In his Paris paper, Leakey (1971, p. 26) also asserted that the Kanjera skulls had “brow-ridges of modern Homo sapiens appearance.”

Tobias (1962, p. 344) said about the Kanam jaw: “Nothing that Boswell said really discredited or even weakened the claim of Leakey that the mandible belonged to the stratum in question, nor did Boswell deny the faunal and cultural associations previously attributed to this stratum. . . . a number of subsequent writers have gratuitously assumed that Boswell’s report invalidated all Leakey’s claims. Although Leakey answered some of Boswell’s specific criticisms, the reply has seldom been quoted and little cognizance has seemingly been taken of it.” But, as we shall see below, Tobias had his own ideas about the age and evolutionary status of the Kanam jaw.

11.2.7 Morphology of the kanam jaw

Scientists have described the Kanam jaw in a multiplicity of ways. In 1932, a committee of English anatomists proclaimed it Homo sapiens (Woodward et al.

1933). Louis Leakey initially attributed the jaw to a new species, Homo kanamensis, a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens. But his biographer Sonia Cole (1975, pp. 103–104) said he soon gave up that designation in favor of Homo sapiens. Sir Arthur Keith (1935, p. 163), the dean of British anthropologists, also considered the Kanam jaw Homo sapiens. But in the 1940s Keith decided the jaw was most likely from an australopithecine (Tobias 1968, p. 180).

Tobias, an expert on the Australopithecinae, disagreed. After comparing the Kanam jaw with available Australopithecus jaws, Tobias (1968, p. 181) found it was, among other things, “much less robust” and different in the “general conformation and orientation” of the front part of the jaw.

Tobias (1962, p. 341) suggested that some of the sapiens-like features of the front part of the Kanam jaw might be, at least partially, the result of bone growth in response to a tumor on the inner surface of the front part of the jaw. Tobias was, however, not the first to notice the tumor.

Almost 20 years earlier, Sir Arthur Keith (1935, p. 163) wrote: “the chin of this representative of early humanity was the seat of a bony tumour of an exceedingly rare kind. The tumour, which grew from the deep aspect of the jaw, just behind the chin, has spread over and obscured the normal features of this region. Enough remains, however, to make quite certain that in dimensions and in its features, the chin region of this early being was shaped as in primitive types of living humanity—such as the aborigines of Australia.” In other words, Keith, at that time, took the chin features to be within the range of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Despite the effects of the bone tumor on the inner surface of the chin, Tobias (1962, p. 349) thought the lower front part of the Kanam jaw had some features like that of the modern human chin—although not as well developed. For example, the Kanam jaw, like the human jaw, has a pronounced incurvation below the level of the teeth and an outward swelling of the bone at the base of the front part of the jaw (Figures 11.4g–h).

But Tobias also called attention to the depth and thickness of the jaw, the relatively large size of some of the teeth, and other features that he regarded as primitive. Tobias (1962, p. 355) observed: “Several, though not all, of these features might be encountered individually as exceptional variants among modern African mandibles.” He thought the Kanam jaw most closely resembled the late Middle Pleistocene mandible from Rabat in Morocco, and Upper Pleistocene mandibles such as those from the Cave of Hearths in South Africa and Dire-Dawa in Ethiopia (Tobias 1968, p. 181).

Recent workers class Rabat and Cave of Hearths as “early archaic Homo sapiens” (Bräuer 1984, pp. 380, 394). The Rabat mandible is said to have no true chin (Howell 1978, pp. 196, 204), while the Cave of Hearths mandible is said to have “a slight to moderate chin” (Tobias 1971, p. 338). The Dire-Dawa mandible, said to have no true chin, is nevertheless listed as Homo sapiens sapiens (Howell 1978, p. 214).

According to Tobias (1968, pp. 190–191), all of these mandibles displayed “neanderthaloid” features. He placed them, along with other neanderthaloid fossils, in the subspecies Homo sapiens rhodesiensis, which he regarded as transitional between Homo erectus and more developed African Neanderthals.

In 1960, Louis Leakey (1960d, p. xix), retreating from his earlier view that the Kanam jaw was sapiens-like, wrote: “it becomes highly probable that the Kanam mandible represents, in fact, a female of Zinjanthropus.”

Leakey had found Zinjanthropus in 1959, at Olduvai Gorge (Section 11.4.1). He briefly promoted this apelike creature as the first toolmaker, and thus the first truly humanlike being. Shortly thereafter, fossils of Homo habilis were found at Olduvai. Leakey quickly demoted Zinjanthropus from his status as toolmaker, placing him among the robust australopithecines (A. boisei ).

In the early 1970s, Leakey’s son Richard, working at Lake Turkana, Kenya, discovered fossil jaws of Homo habilis that resembled the Kanam jaw. Since the Lake Turkana Homo habilis jaws were discovered with a fauna similar to that at Kanam, the elder Leakey changed his mind once more, suggesting that the Kanam jaw could be assigned to Homo habilis (L. Leakey 1972, p. 36; Cole 1975, p. 362).

That scientists have attributed the Kanam jaw to almost every known hominid (Australopithecus, Australopithecus boisei, Homo habilis, Neanderthal man, Early Homo sapiens, anatomically modern Homo sapiens) shows the difficulties involved in properly classifying hominid fossil remains.

Tobias’s suggestion that the Kanam jaw came from a variety of early Homo sapiens, with neanderthaloid features, has won wide acceptance. Yet as can be seen in Figure 11.4, which shows outlines of the Kanam mandible and other hominid mandibles, the contour of the Kanam mandible’s chin region is similar to that of the Border Cave specimen (f ), recognized as Homo sapiens sapiens, and to that of a modern South African native (g). All three share two key features of the modern human chin, namely, an incurvation toward the top and a swelling outward at the base.

Figure 11.4 The outlines of the mandibles shown here (not to scale) were traced from published photographs, except for (a) and (g), which were traced from a drawing. (a) Australopithecus, Omo, Ethiopia (Eckhardt 1972, p. 103); (b) Homo erectus, Heidelberg (Mauer), Germany (Osborn 1916, p. 98); (c) Early Homo sapiens, Arago, France (Stringer et al. 1984, p. 64); (d) Neanderthal, Shanidar, Iraq (Gowlett 1984, p. 104); (e) Homo sapiens rhodesiensis (“neanderthaloid” according to P. V. Tobias), Cave of Hearths, South Africa (Tobias 1971, p. 338); (f ) Homo sapiens sapiens, Border Cave, South Africa (Bräuer 1984, p. 381); (g) Homo sapiens sapiens, modern South African native (Zuckerman 1954, p. 308); (h) the Kanam mandible (Tobias 1962, p. 345).