Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

National Geographic magazine featured an article by Mary Leakey titled “Footprints in the Ashes of Time.” A caption to a photo of some hominid prints read: “The best-preserved print shows the raised arch, rounded heel, pronounced ball, and forward-pointing big toe necessary for walking erect. Pressures exerted along the foot attest to a striding gait” (M. Leakey 1979, p. 452). Dr. Louise Robbins, a footprint expert from the University of North Carolina, observed: “They looked so human, so modern, to be found in tuffs so old” (M. Leakey 1979, p. 452).

Readers who have accompanied us this far in our intellectual journey will have little difficulty in recognizing the Laetoli footprints as potential evidence for the presence of anatomically modern human beings over 3.6 million years ago in Africa. We were, however, somewhat astonished to encounter such a striking anomaly in the unexpected setting of the more recent annals of standard paleoanthropological research. What amazed us most was that scientists of worldwide reputation, the best in their profession, could look at these footprints, describe their humanlike features, and remain completely oblivious to the possibility that the creatures that made them might have been as humanlike as ourselves.

Their mental currents were running in the usual fixed channels. Mary Leakey (1979, p. 453) wrote: “at least 3,600,000 years ago, in Pliocene times, what I believe to be man’s direct ancestor walked fully upright with a bipedal, free-striding gait. . . . the form of his foot was exactly the same as ours.”

Who was the ancestor? Here we once more confront the debate, between the Leakeys on one hand and Johanson and White on the other, about the number and type of species represented by the fossil materials from Hadar and Laetoli.

Taking the Leakeys’ point of view, the Laetoli footprints would have been made by a nonaustralopithecine ancestor of Homo habilis. Taking the JohansonWhite point of view, the Laetoli footprints would have been made by Australopithecus afarensis. In either case, the creature who made the prints would have had an apelike head and other primitive features.

But why not a creature with fully modern feet and fully modern body? There is nothing in the footprints that rules this out. Furthermore, we have compiled in this book quite a bit of fossil evidence, some of it from Africa, that is consistent with the presence of anatomically modern human beings in the Early Pleistocene and the Late Pliocene.

The most prominent set of tracks at Laetoli represented the footprints of three hominids, one larger than the others. Applying an anthropological rule of thumb that a hominid’s foot length represents 15 percent of the creature’s height, Mary Leakey (1979, p. 453) calculated that the largest hominid stood 4 feet, 8 inches tall, whereas the next largest stood 4 feet tall. The smallest would have been still shorter. Leakey hypothesized that the largest individual was an adult male, the next largest an adult female, and the smallest a child. Admitting this was only a guess, she suggested the alternative possibility that the second largest set of prints might represent a juvenile male (M. Leakey 1979, p. 453). One cannot, however, be certain that the largest tracks represent a fully adult form either. Even so, the heights of the creatures that made the two larger sets of tracks, as estimated by Mary Leakey, fall within the modern human adult range.

Are we perhaps exaggerating the humanlike features of the Laetoli footprints? Let us see what various researchers have said. Louise M. Robbins, who provided an initial evaluation of the Laetoli prints to Mary Leakey in 1979, later published a more detailed report. Several sets of tracks, identified by letters, were found at Laetoli. In examining the “G” trails, representing the three individuals described by Mary Leakey as a possible family group, Robbins (1987, p. 501) found that the prints “share many features that are characteristic of the human foot structure.”

Robbins (1987, p. 501) noted: “Each hominid has a non-divergent great toe, or toe 1, and that toe is about twice as large as toe 2 beside it.” She found the spacing between toes 1 and 2 “no greater than one finds in many people today, including individuals who habitually wear shoes” (1987, p. 501). Robbins also found “the ball region of the hominids’ feet is of human form” and added that the feet displayed “a functionally stable longitudinal arch structure” (1987, p. 501). Finally, she observed that “the heel impressions in the hominids’ footprints appear human in their form and in their locomotory performance” (Robbins 1987, p. 501).

Robbins (1987, p. 501) therefore concluded that “the four functional regions—heel, arch, ball, and toes—of the hominids’ feet imprinted the ash in a typically human manner” and that “the hominids walked across the ash surface in characteristic human bipedal fashion.”