The querulous-looking fellow crouching next to Anthropologist Richard Leakey on our cover this week is Homo habilis, a 2-million-year-old hominid who was one of the predecessors of Homo sapiens. His reincarnation for the Science section story on the origins of man was the inspiration of Art Director Walter Bernard and Photographer Carl Fischer, who saw the story of man's roots as a pictorial as well as anthropological challenge.

But the rebirth of Homo habilis was not easy. Fischer asked Hollywood Makeup Artist Bob O'Bradovich, whose credits include work for Beatlemania and the Hallmark Hall of Fame, to prepare a mask of Homo habilis from Leakey's sketches. A rubber model was made in New York, which Fischer and O'Bradovich then took to Leakey in Nairobi.

There the anthropologist ordered several revisions, and O'Bradovich made a new model. The shopping list he gave our Nairobi bureau included a pair of brown glass eyes, a dead rabbit and false eyelashes; and he also requested a personal guard to protect his equipment and handiwork from whatever hazards might lurk in the bush. In three 18-hour days, O'Bradovich fashioned a plaster head modeled from skull fragments, then used the head to mold a latex mask of a Homo habilis face. A Kenyan volunteer wore the mask for Fischer's cover photograph, taken in the desolate Rift Valley outside Nairobi.

Leakey was impressed. "When TIME first said they wanted me to pose with Homo habilis, I thought it was a joke," he says.

"But the result is quite good: the photo shows that while the human head has changed through evolution, the body of early man is similar to that of today's man."

The story was written by Peter Stoler, with assistance from F. Sydnor Vanderschmidt, and edited by Leon Jaroff. David Wood, our Nairobi bureau chief, spent two weeks interviewing Leakey and his colleagues in such varied settings as the anthropologist's camp in northern Kenya, the noisy cabin of the four-seat Cessna that Leakey uses to get there, and the fossil storage room in the basement of Nairobi's International Louis Leakey Memorial Institute. "As in anthropology," Wood notes, "interpreting the mass of data that filled my notebooks proved more difficult than collecting it."

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