13 A million-year-old Homo sapiens skeleton (‘Oldoway man’)
The ‘Reck skull’
In 1913, Professor Hans Reck (1886-1937) of Berlin University discovered an anatomically modern human skeleton at Olduvai Gorge in what was then German East Africa. The skeletal remains, including a complete skull, had to be removed from the highly cemented deposit in which they were contained with hammers and chisels, leading Reck to believe that the remains were of high antiquity. He believed that the deposits above the skeleton were undisturbed, but the contracted position of the skeleton and its completeness are very different from the usual condition of fossils, which tend to be of body parts rather than complete skeletons. It was partly thanks to the controversy surrounding this discovery that Louis Leakey (1903-1972) became fascinated with the Olduvai Gorge site. Reck’s skeleton was notorious because its age could not be established satisfactorily. As Reck could not return to the site (he was German and the United Kingdom had acquired Germany’s African colonies as a result of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles), Leakey began his lifetime’s work there.
The difficulty with accepting Reck’s skeleton as being a million years old (as some creationists have claimed) is that his work was done without any appreciation of archaeological stratigraphy. Although the deposit from which the skeleton was recovered was of that sort of age, it was not clear to Reck if the burial was intrusive (in other words, deposited more recently by digging a grave into that particular geological stratum). Indeed, geological analysis of the material surrounding the skeleton showed it to contain red pebbles and limestone chips derived from higher (i.e. later) strata than that in which the skeleton was thought to have lain. This makes it certain that it was intrusive, in other words, in a grave cut down from a higher layer. As early as 1932, Leakey’s work there showed that this has to be the most economical explanation; had there been anatomically modern humans at this date in the gorge, we would expect to find other remains in contemporary strata, and as we do not, we must question Reck’s original judgement. In fact, even Reck later came to agree that the skeleton was of a recently buried human (most estimates now put it at around 20,000 years old). The ever-useful TalkOrigins website contains a useful (and fully annotated) rebuttal of the claims.
14 A ‘Neanderthal’ shot with a modern bullet
The Kabwe skull
A number of books and internet sites make the claim that The British Museum (Natural History) in London holds the skull of a Neanderthal, dated 38,000 years old and excavated in 1921 at Kabwe in what is now Zambia. The left side of the skull displays a circular hole about 8 mm in diameter. None of the radial split-lines that would have been left had the hole been made by a cold projectile, such as a spear, are visible around the hole. On the opposite side of the skull, the parietal bone is shattered, as if skull was blown up from inside. Two solutions have been proposed: either the skull is from something that lived in recent centuries and was shot by a European, or there were rifles in Palaeolithic Africa.
Virtually nothing is correct in these claims. The Kabwe skull (often known as ‘Broken Hill Man’ after the name of a nearby town) is older than the claim, at 125,000 to 300,000 years old, and it was found on 17 June 1921 by a Swiss miner, Tom Zwiglaar, in a limestone cave. It was the first early human fossil to be found in Africa and was sent to Arthur Smith Woodward (1864-1944), who gave it the new species name Homo rhodesiensis (Rhodesian Man). More recent anthropologists have preferred to see it as a primitive form of Homo sapiens, but are undecided on the precise species. It may be related to Homo heidelbergensis, the ancestor of the predominantly European Neanderthals (there were never any Neanderthals in Africa) or it may indeed be a separate species, Homo rhodesiensis, as Arthur Smith Woodward originally proposed, which would be our direct ancestor. There is a useful discussion linked below.
So much for the species and the date. What about the “bullet hole”? Well, for one thing, it did not kill the individual. The edges of the lesion have started to heal, so whatever caused the hole was not the cause of death. Instead, the wound appears to have been a pathological, rather than a traumatic lesion, caused by an infection in the soft tissue over it. Few individuals survive a bullet to the brain; needless to say, the parietal bone on the opposite side is not shattered, as is claimed, but is very much intact. The individual may thus have died from a pathological condition, perhaps an abscess or ulcer that had become septic.