Richard Leakey Reflects On Human Past—And Future
A great interview with Dr. Leakey at NPR, please go listen to or read the whole thing to see why I admire PaleoAnthropologists so much more than PaleoConservatives.
last few years they’ve been looking for the origin of Homo and trying to find out what more complete specimens would have looked like that relate to the Homo habilis story that my parents worked on at Olduvai, and maybe looking into the whole question of the ancestry of Homo and whether Homo habilis, which comes before Homo erectus, really is distinctive from some of the things that have been called Homo habilis but are not.
It all gets very technical, but one of the problems with paleo-anthropology is that although there’s a remarkable story, much of the story is still represented by frustratingly fragmentary evidence. And so more has to be found to tie up a few loose ends. But it’s so much further along than it used to be even 20 years ago.
FLATOW: So when you find a fossil, what do you see in these old bones that can tell you whether or not something was our ancestor?
Dr. LEAKEY: Well, I guess it’s like - it’s harder today in America, where you use paper cups and paper plates. But if you think of your grandparents’ cutlery and crockery, if you break up a series of plates of different kinds and different sources and you mix it up with the dirt, and you’ve studied the plates and crockery, when you pick something up, you can say: Ah, this is the edge of a plate that was probably used for soup. And: Ah, this is a plate that was probably used for dessert. And this is a piece of a plate that was probably a serving plate. Just from its shape, thickness and design.
If you’re familiar with anatomy, and you’re familiar with the anatomy of fossils that have been found previously, it’s relatively easy to categorize what you’re finding quite quickly into a broad set of characters.
Then clearly you have the problems if you haven’t found enough of the specimen, what it actually compares to, but you can look on the specimen and see if it’s got any evidence of being recently broken. You then determine whether to excavate, whether to screen the area, and you can gradually build up a picture.
It’s like when we found the Turkana Boy. I didn’t find it, but Kimoya(ph), one of my assistants, discovered a little piece of skull. And it was clearly a little piece of a hominid skull, but whether it was going to lead to anything, I didn’t know.
But in these cases, you always look further, and within a few days we had found enough of the skull to know that the front of the skull was represented with a fragment, the back of the skull was represented with a fragment, and so presumably the middle of the skull was too.