Searching for the Common Link

Anthropologists agree that the family of man and the family of apes sprang from a common ancestor. But they have never been able to agree on the time at which man and apes began to take separate paths. As recently as World War II, it was believed that manlike creatures began to evolve five or six million years ago. In the years after the war, the discovery and dating of skeletal remains pushed the existence of man's direct ancestors back to 10 million and then to 14 million years. Now famed Kenya-born Anthropologist Louis Leakey has evidence that a manlike creature he has named Kenyapithecus africanus roamed over eastern Africa concurrently with apes 20 million years ago.

Leakey actually fabricated Kenyapithecus africanus from bone fragments that he and other scientists had dug from the ground as long ago as 1947. Until recently, he himself had classified many of these fragments as belonging to apelike creatures called Sivapithecus africanus and Proconsul, which lived in Kenya during the Lower Miocene epoch, about 20 million years ago.

Kenyan Fragments. But in the early 1960s, a rare display of unity among anthropologists convinced Leakey that he had better reevaluate the classification of certain fossil bones. Most of his colleagues had become persuaded, Leakey says, that a collection of bone and teeth fragments he had found under a Kenya farm in 1961 and other fragments discovered in 1934 in the foothills of the Himalayas represented similar species of manlike beings that lived between 10 million and 14 million years ago--in the Upper Miocene. In the hopes of finding their ancestors, Leakey in 1965 began a search of museum drawers and showcases for bone fragments of the Lower Miocene--and came across the familiar Sivapithecus and Proconsul remains. Applying 14 standard tests of the shape and size of jawbones and teeth to these long-ignored bone fragments, Leakey concluded that their characteristics were definitely more manlike than apelike, and reclassified them as Kenyapithecus africanus. Unlike the rectangular, one-rooted molars of apelike creatures, for example, the Kenyapithecus' molars were triangular and had two roots. Its incisors were in line with its canines; ape incisors protrude in front of the canines. Kenyapithecus' chin projected slightly to the front of its teeth; an ape's chin recedes behind its teeth. To Leakey, the proof is undeniable: "Man's separation from his closest cousins--the apes--is now carried back more than a million generations."

Egyptian Diggings. Although he is currently raising funds to finance future diggings in Kenya, Leakey feels that he has little chance of finding the common ancestor of both man and the apes--a creature he believes may have lived some 40 million years ago, in the Oligocene epoch. Yale Paleontologist Elwyn Simons is working in Egypt's Fayum province, Leakey notes, an area rich in material from the Oligocene. His somewhat sad prediction: "He will be the man who gets the common link."

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