The Oldest Man?

When the young anthropology assistant burst into the campsite in Ethiopia's remote Awash Valley, he was so excited that he could hardly gasp out the news. Only five minutes' walk from the tents, he had just spotted a completely intact human-like jawbone sticking out from under a layer of volcanic rock on the shore of a dry lake. Alemayehu Asfaw figured that the fossil was at least as old as the rock--and the rock had already been dated as more than 3 million years old.

The American leader of the expedition, Anthropologist Carl Johanson of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, rushed to Asfaw's find. "I recognized the fossil almost at once as one of the oldest human remains ever discovered." he recalls.

Beetle-Browed Brute. Johanson's conclusion is bound to cause controversy in the scientific community. Most anthropologists have been convinced that the first member of the genus Homo, or true man (as opposed to the hominids, or man-apes), was a beetle-browed, stoop-shouldered brute called Homo erectus, who appeared in Africa about a million or so years ago. But two years ago, Richard Leakey, following in the footsteps of his famed anthropologist father, the late Louis B. Leakey, undermined that theory. Digging near Kenya's Lake Rudolf, he uncovered fragments that were assembled into a nearly complete manlike skull that is at least 2.6 million years old. Leakey's find suggested that creatures amazingly like modern man were prowling about Africa long before Homo erectus appeared.

Johanson's fossil, which he thinks may be 4 million years old. could push the history of man even further back. His evidence that the jawbone belonged to Homo rather than a hominid is probably based on subtle differences: slight nuances of size and shape in the fossil teeth. But Johanson is convinced that these teeth belonged to a full-fledged Homo, who probably used them to eat meat, which he obtained by "using tools, possibly bones, to kill animals." Furthermore, since there is recent geological evidence that Ethiopia's Awash Valley may once have been part of the Arabian Peninsula. Johanson ventures an even more imaginative theory: the cradle of man may be Arabia, not Africa.

Leakey rejects that notion, but he does side with Johanson on another conclusion. It has long been thought that man's direct ancestor prior to Homo erectus was a small, possibly toolmaking man-ape called Australopithecus, who lived in Africa as recently as 1.5 million years ago. If Johanson's jawbone belonged to a true Homo, the australopiths may well have had overwhelming competition from even smarter creatures who evolved into modern man.

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