'Missing Link' Skull Found In Africa

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28992, 5 September 1959, Page 13

'Missing Link' Skull Found In Africa

(Rec. 9 p.m.) NAIROBI, September 4. A Kenya anthropologist, Dr. Louis Leakey, said at a press conference in Nairobi yesterday that he had found the “missing link” between man and apeman after a 32-year search in Tanganyika.

He described the discovery of a Pre-human skull in Tanganyika’s Olduwai Gorge as “stupendous.”

Dr. Leakey, the curator of Kenya's Corydon Museum, said he called the press conference because his announcement of the find at a scientific conference in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo, last w eek had not been adequately reported.

The world was still unaware of ihe value of the find, he said. Dr. Leakey claimed that the •hull, unearthed in Olduwai Gorge on July 17, was the oldest skull of tool-making man ever discovered, and dated back more than 600,000 years, perhaps even a million years. The skull was virtually complete and came from a youth of about 18. who lived in a land of Eiant birds and pigs as big as a Present-day rhinoceros. Dr. Leakey said.

He believed that the rest of the youth’s skeleton was buried under »0 tons of rock. The skull showed the youth was not a man, or an ape, but a link between ape-man and man.

“This discovery adds one more convincing piece of evidence to the truth of Darwin’s view of human evolution—that man and apes evolved from a common stock of great antiquity,” Dr. Leakey said.

Features of the skull were its enormous teeth, small brain, and very large face, he said. The youth had lived mainly on nuts and other hard foods, and had just begun to eat mice, snakes and lizards.

He died from causes other than Violence. possibly pneumonia, and had probably been covered by thorn bushes bv his comrades to

prevent his remains from being eaten by hyenas. Soon after, a lake had risen in the gorge, covering and preserving him for what could be as much as a million years. The American Associated Press said Dr. Leakey was hoping for British and American financial aid to excavate the rest of the remote gorge, which cuts through several lake beds in semi-desert country.

Dr. Leakey estimates its age at present at 600,000 years, in the Pleistocene era, and says it is the “oldest, well-established stone toolmaker ever found anywhere.” He has named the species Zinjanthropus Boisei. Zinj is the ancient name for East Africa, and Boisei is after his London backer. Mr Charles Boisei. He told the press conference he was certain it was the missing link between the ape-men Australopithecus and Paranthropus. and true man.

Born of missionary parents. Dr. Leakey is known as the “white Kikuyu,” and is a member of the tribe notorious for the infamous Mau Mau movement. As early as 1951 he warned of the dangers of Mau Mau —more than'a year before the Kenya Government showed real concern. During the emergency he worked in the intelligence service. Dr. Leakey said that leading anthropologists, palaeontologists, and geologists at the Pan-African Congress on pre-history at Leopoldville last week, agreed with his findings. The Olduwai Gorge, rich m fossils, was discovered by a German butterfly collector in 1911. Two years later Kaiser Wilhelm sent an expedition to investigate.