f. Homo Habilis -- The taxon Homo habilis had an illegitimate birth when Mary Leakey discovered some badly shattered skull fragments in 1959. Her husband Louis made the comment that it was nothing more than a "damned australopithecine". His attitude soon changed however when he found stone tools near the site of Homo habilis. Jumping into the fire, he quickly named it Homo and publicized the find widely. He was soon discredited when other australopithecenes were found in Africa, also with stone tools. Homo habilis was "demoted" to australopithecine. This didn't stop Leakey, though. In 1964, he found four more specimens in Olduvai Gorge. These he claimed had bigger brains than Australopithecus and surely deserved to be classified as Homo habilis. Measurements of the cranial capacity were nearly impossible since the skulls were so badly crushed but, nonetheless, it was concluded that they averaged 642 cc's, or 200 cc's larger than Australopithecus and he considered that enough to make them Homo. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Leakey was about his new "handymen". Homo habilis was soon considered an empty taxon that was inadequately proposed. New life was breathed into Homo habilis by Louis and Mary's son, Richard Leakey who was working in the Lake Rudolf area in Kenya. Leakey found numerous stone tools and 40 specimens of Australopithecus. Then, in 1972, he he made a discovery that was to shake the world of paleoanthropology to it's foundations. He found the toolmaker his father had long sought in vain. Perhaps he found even more than he bargained for. He found several fossilized bone fragments of a skull which his wife Meave carefully assembled to make a nearly complete skull minus the lower jaw. The skull was named KNMER 1470 for its registration at the Kenya National Museum in East Rudolf. The skull capacity was difficult to measure because of the condition of the assemblage but was estimated to be 800 cc's (later lowered to 750 cc's), much larger than so called ape-men skulls. There were only small eyebrow ridges, no crest and a domed skull typical of humans today. Indeed it appeared to be a human skull. Professor A. Cave who first demonstrated that Neanderthal man was completely human examined 1470 in London and concluded: "As far as I can see, typically human". In addition, Leakey found 2 complete femurs, a part of a third femur and parts of a tibia and fibula near the skull which he said "cannot be readily distinguished from Homo sapien." I didn't mean to exhaust so much space on Homo habilis, but I just can't stop. Let's talk about the dating of 1470. In 1969 samples of KBS tuft from just above the layer in which 1470 was found was sent to Cambridge University for potassium argon dating. Three different test gave an age of 220 million years old +or- 7 million years ! This was considered unacceptable for for this strata given its fossil content, so the errors were blamed on "extraneous" argon. Several more tests were done, and the best, most acceptable date was placed at 2.61 million years old. In National Geographic of June 1973 Richard Leakey stated," Either we toss out the 1470 skull or we toss out all our theories of early man. It simply fits no previous models of human beginnings. 1470 leaves in ruin the notion that all early fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence of evolutionary changes." AGREED !! What was the problem? The problem, given the age of 2.61 myo, made 1470 contemporaneous with Australopithecus, if not older--yet looked identical to modern man. (Aren't you glad I kept going?) This absolutely unseated Australopithecus as ancestor of modern man ! In later lectures, Richard Leakey never made reference to 1470, preferring perhaps, to sweep it under the rug. However, in a PBS documentary in 1990 he stated,"If pressed about man's ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving." This from the world's foremost paleoanthropologist !
