Ape-man goes home to Kenya

Press, 10 November 1981, Page 34

Ape-man goes home to Kenya

By

ALASTAIR MATHESON

from Nairobi

Kenya, one of the world’s richest of fossil clues to man’s early ancestors, has secured the return from Britain of a priceless skull millions of years old.

It is of an immature Proconsul Africanus, a small ape-like creature, and was found by Mary Leakey in 1948 on an island in Lake Victoria, Africa's largest stretch of water. It has told scientists much about the period when man was emerging.

Appropriately, the man who brought the skull back is the discoverer’s son, Richard Leakey, now director of the National Museums of Kenya and another member of this family of Kenyans who have done so much to unearth important fossilised remains. (The senior member of the Leakey family, Dr Louis, now dead, also had many important finds to his credit.) The skull of Proconsul bad been in the custody of the British Museum in London for 30 years and was released to Kenya only after lengthy negotiations and the production of documentary Eroof that the skull had been ;nt to the British Musuem, not given. Like neighbouring Tanza-

nia and Ethiopia, Kenya has a wealth of fossilised remains of early man, most of them discovered in that tremendous scar on the earth's surface, the Rift Valley. i However, Proconsul was found further to the west, on

what is now Rusinga Island but what was millions of years ago a tropical forest. The great significence of the skull is its age, dating back to the Miocene epoch between 26 and seven million years ago. Kenya now has not only the Proconsul skull found by Mary Leakey but a nearcomplete skeleton of another individual found on the same island in 1951. Because it is probably the oldest skeleton of one of man’s ancestors, it has been labelled “the most important fossil to come from Africa in recent years.” Although it was dug up in 1951, many years elapsed before the fragmented skeleton was property identified and separated from a variety of fossil remains from the same pit — the bones of pigs, snakes, lizards, birds, and rodents. The first clue to the pos-

sible existence of the skeleton was spotted in a museum in England when a British geologist who grew up in Kenya, Martin Pickford, noticed among fossils all labelled “pigs” what seemed to be a primate foot.

He and an American anatomist, Alan Walker, set about searching for other fragments. Further digging on Rusinga Island yielded more bones. Then an incredible hunt through a pile of 10,000 fossil fragments stored in a Nairobi museum ended two years later with a 50 per cent complete skeleton. It is this skeleton which demolished an earlier theory that Proconsul Africanus was more monkey-like than apelike. Richard Leakey, now an authority in his own right, believes that man split from a common ancestor with the apes a long time ago. Many other scientists believe man originated much more recently and not more than three million years ago. Leakey is still digging in search of more evidence for his theory. Copyright - London Observer Service.