Pygmy Progenitor?

Among fellow anthropologists, Britain's L.S.B. Leakey is revered--with reservations. Since 1931 he has been excavating the Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, which is perhaps the richest known deposit of human and prehuman fossils. The site of Leakey's excavations was once a small lake that gradually filled and dried up, preserving in stone the bones of many creatures, some of them primates, that lived on its shores. Much later, a river cut a canyon through the lake bed, bringing the bones to light.

Out of this treasure chest came bones of a lowbrowed creature that Dr. Leakey named Zinjanthropus and assigned in 1959 to an honored position in man's direct ancestry. He was sure that Zinjanthropus was a toolmaker because crude stone tools were found near his remains. Many anthropologists disagreed with both these conclusions, and now Dr. Leakey has changed his mind. He now believes that Zinjanthropus was an Australopithecine, a nonhuman vegetarian of low intelligence and not a toolmaker.

But out of the same and nearby strata came bones of a creature that is much more manlike. His well-formed foot shows that he walked erect. Despite his small brain size, he had a fairly high forehead, not a flat one like that of Zinjanthropus. He was probably about 4 ft. tall, but Dr. Leakey thinks that he used tools and weapons. Sometimes he may have killed and eaten his stupid cousin Zinjanthropus.

Dr. Leakey wants to call this up-and-coming pygmy Homo habilis, or skillful man, and recognize him as a direct ancestor of modern man. He thinks that a prehuman creature called Kenyapithecus lived in East Africa 12 million years ago and evolved into Homo habilis and at least two other different types, notably Australopithecus and erectus, a near man that includes both Java and Peking man. From Homo habilis, Leakey believes, are descended both Neanderthal man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens). His theory, if correct, would trace man's ancestry back to the Pliocene Age, roughly 1,850,000 years ago and more than 1,000,000 years before Java man, commonly considered modern man's earliest known forebear.

Not many anthropologists accept this genealogy in its entirety. Some of them argue that Dr. Leakey's newfound fossils are examples of prehuman creatures that happen to look fairly manlike. Others agree that they are extremely interesting but maintain that they are too fragmentary to assign a definite place in the primate family tree. Leakey's Homo habilis may well become established as an ancestral man--if he is not first demoted to an apeman, as was Zinjanthropus.

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