UNBURIED TREASURE:
Mary and Louis Leakey examine fossils they found in Tanzania
July 17, 1959
Uncovering Earliest Man
By Richard E. Leakey
My father was ill that morning, so my mother set out alone in the Land
Rover, accompanied by her two Dalmatians. She spent the morning crawling
along the slope of the nearby gorge but found very little until just
before noon, when she noticed a scrap of enormously thick bone
protruding from beneath the surface. She instantly realized that it was
part of a hominid skull—and that two teeth were embedded in the
rock just above it. Elated, she drove back to camp to tell my father
Louis. As he remembered it, she rushed in crying, "I've got him! I've
got him! I've got him!" What my mother Mary had discovered were the
fragments of a fossil skull that was later to be named Zinjanthropus
boisei. It was to rivet world attention on the Olduvai Gorge in
Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and on the work of my parents.
I arrived at
Olduvai a day after the skull was found. My parents' simple camp seemed
to radiate the excitement of the moment, and I don't recall ever seeing
my parents in such high spirits. The skull that my mother recovered was
in many pieces, but she and my father were able to piece it back
together. It was the first really significant find at Olduvai; indeed,
it was the only well-preserved fossil hominid to have been found outside
South Africa, several thousand miles to the south.
Unlike the South
African sites, which lacked distinct geological layers, Olduvai offered
a chance to get some real ages for the fossils. Using a method known as
potassium-argon dating, Zinjanthropus was determined to be 1.75
million years old. At the time, this was staggering. It almost tripled
the skull's estimated age, which had been obtained by geological
interpretation. It stretched back our evolutionary perspective. Since
that day, hundreds of hominid fossils have been discovered across a wide
range of African sites. Many of these are undoubtedly of greater
scientific interest than the 1959 find, but in my opinion no other
discovery has had the impact on this field of human inquiry. The dating
of the Olduvai strata began a new chapter in our understanding of human
origins: it added the dimension of real time to evolution.
Leakey,
now an environmentalist, is working on a major international
wildlife-conservation fund for East Africa
TIME Cover
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