Kattwinkel's Heirs

Chasing a fancy butterfly in the green wilds of Tanganyika 50 years ago. a German entomologist named Kattwinkel tumbled off a rocky ledge and nearly killed himself. When he regained his senses, he found himself in an anthropologist's dream world: an erosion-created rift with layer after layer of fossils, bones and ancient artifacts. The find was named Olduvai Gorge, and Kattwinkel's heirs ever since have been scrambling up and down its sun-baked sides in search of clues to man's earliest awakening.

Now, veteran Olduvai Fossil-Hunter Louis S. B. Leakey. 57. reports that he and his family last year discovered what he calls, using a phrase familiar among anthropologists, "earliest man." Leakey's earliest man is described as more than 600,000 years old. or some 100,000 years older than the Peking man or Java man. Says Leakey, a broad, rumpled, sometime Cambridge don: "My 19-year-old son Jonathan wandered across a slope during a pause in our other work at Olduvai and picked up a small fragment of animal jaw. 'You've got a saber-toothed tiger.' I said. We'd been expecting to get one. So we started a small dig, and the first thing we got was a human tooth. That's the way things are found in archaeology-a combination of keen observation and luck."

Skull & Collarbone. Working for seven months on hands and knees, their eyes just a few inches from the ground, Leakey, his wife and his son sifted the yellow earth and painstakingly uncovered bones, using camel's hair brushes and dental picks to prevent them from breaking. They found remains of two humans-a child thought to be about eleven and an adult, both of undetermined sex. From the child, there were skull fragments, a jawbone, bones from a hand and foot and a collarbone. Left from the ancient adult were some teeth, skull fragments and a collarbone.

The find is the latest of many in the snake-infested Olduvai. Leakey, a British missionary's son who was born in a wattle hut in neighboring Kenya and grew up with Kikuyu children, had been scouring the gorge since 1931. Over the years he has unearthed the bones of an ancient pig as big as a rhino, a six-foot-tall sheep, a twelve-foot-tall bird and the flat-topped skull of the erect "Nutcracker man." so named because of his huge molars that suggested that he lived on nuts and tough vegetation. Leakey put the Nutcracker man's age at 600,000 years. He holds that the bones of his latest find--the child and adult--are older still because they were buried in a lower stratum of the Olduvai Gorge.

Foul Play. What did those "oldest" creatures look like? The bones suggest that they had great chests, big jaws and short legs. "Beyond that." Leakey says, "your guess is as good as mine. They might have been as green as a jersey dress."

Months of testing will tell more. Meantime, Leakey has a theory as to how the child died. In its skull is a sizable hole with fracture lines radiating from it. Leakey rules out the possibility that the child fell or was struck by a falling branch, for there were no trees or cliffs in the neighborhood at the time. "I think we can take it for granted that the child was hit on the head by a blunt instrument." says Leakey, warming to his story. "It was murder most foul."

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