Science and Religion

Misty, watercolored memories of the way we were—This nostalgic lyric of a popular ballad sings to an almost-universal yearning. Bitter sweet though this may be, we are always fascinated by memories of "the way we were." Scientists are no exception. One of the most lively and exciting areas of current re search involves the search by scientists for "the way we were" when man first appeared. Ever since the 1924 discovery of the first australopithecine "ape-man," the search has centered in Africa, but it has now reached new intensity with today's large, multidisciplinary expeditions. These are electrifying times in paleoanthropology. New finds are pouring out of East Africa at an unprecedented clip. The rate of discovery has been so high that the search has been temporarily halted in one area until the materials already recovered can be intellectually digested!1 Surely a new day has dawned in a field of study famous more for the speculative leap than the firm fact.

The wealth of new evidence has upset the neat and convincing theory of human evolution developed prior to 1972. That interpretation of human origins advanced by anthropologists was buttressed by an appeal to a hominid fossil record that seemed to make sense when viewed from an evolutionary perspective. Human remains were confined to Pleistocene and upper Pliocene rocks—the geological systems rep resented by the most recent rocks in the geological column. The deeper rocks were devoid of evidence for man, even though they contained abundant fossil remains of other life forms. Evolutionists quite naturally interpreted this as evidence that man had only recently evolved.

Furthermore, when scientists looked at the deposits that contained traces of man or manlike creatures, they noted an impressive stratigraphic progression. Modern man was confined to the upper levels of these deposits (late Pleistocene and post-Pleistocene), whereas Neanderthal or Neanderthallike skeletons were usually found in archeological sites at levels below those containing the remains of modern man. Here seemed to be evidence that modern man had evolved from a more archaic type and was preceded, perhaps with some overlap, by Neanderthal man or related forms.

Yet another kind of fossil man, Homo erectus, was known from sediments and rocks interpreted to be older than those containing either modern man or Neanderthal man. The relatively small brain size of Homo erectus was seized upon as an indication that erectus was a primitive species ancestral to both modern man and Neanderthal man. Textbooks and popular articles referred to Homo erectus as the ''first man." ²

In the lowest Pleistocene rocks were found the australopithecines—creatures with many supposedly apelike features (including small brains) and numerous manlike features (including uprightness and humanlike teeth). And finally, anthropologists noted that below the Pleistocene, in rocks still lower in the sequence (Pliocene and Miocene), were found a number of ape fossils that could be interpreted to be ancestors of both modern apes and man.

At the start of this decade, there fore, many anthropologists felt happily secure with a simple straight-line evolutionary model for the origin of man. The fossil record seemed to offer persuasive documentation for a progression from ape to ape-man to primitive man to modern man. The key to the whole picture was the australopithecines, since they were interpreted as evidence for a creature ancestral to man that was intermediate between ape and man.

Textbook picture shattered

This idyllic textbook picture of evolution was shattered in 1972 by Richard Leakey's discovery of Skull 1470. In a two-part series of articles published in MINISTRY in 1974, I discussed the potential importance of Leakey's find, emphasizing how it threatened to complicate or even in validate theories of human evolution that postulated a straight line from Miocene apes to Pleistocene Homo sapiens.³ If Skull 1470 turned out to be the remains of a true man and if it was contemporaneous with the australopithecines, then the australopithecines were not easily interpreted as man's evolutionary ancestors, and the links between ape and man would still be missing links.

The fast-breaking story of man's search for his fossilized ancestors can now be updated. Has the promise of Skull 1470 been fulfilled? To find out, let's survey the discoveries that have been made since 1972.

Success breeds success. The search for early man in East Africa is now much more than the family affair it once was when Louis and Mary Leakey probed the depths of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The search now attracts a great deal of money and scientific talent. Large internationally supported expeditions are taking to the field every year. The expeditions include pa leontologists (fossil experts), radio active-dating specialists, geologists, and archeologists, as well as physical anthropologists. The purpose of these expeditions is not just to find hominid fossils but to (1) arrange them in chronological order, (2) date them absolutely, (3) study the artifacts they left behind, and (4) re construct the environment and land scape they lived in through the study of fossils and sedimentary features.

Fieldwork is now being conducted at four locations in the geologically awesome East African Rift Valley. The African Rift is a split in the earth's crust that runs north and south in East Africa and then branches into Palestine, where it contains the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea. The entire rift-valley complex in Palestine and Africa contains abundant archeological and fossil evidence preserved in a thick sequence of rocks rich in volcanic sediments suitable for radioactive dating.

Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia

The pioneering discovery of hominid (man or manlike) fossils in the Rift Valley, East African Man, was made in 1959. The recent cycle of discoveries began when a joint American and French expedition initiated work in the lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia, just north of Lake Rudolf (now called Lake Turkana). Louis Leakey's son, Richard, inheriting his father's mantle as discoverer extraordinaire, was also involved in this effort, heading a small Kenyan contingent. As fate would have it, the area assigned to the Kenyan party was not very fruitful.

Leakey understandably became restless, and his thoughts turned more and more to deposits east of Lake Rudolf in Kenya that appeared physically and geologically similar to the Omo Valley formations. He couldn't but notice these enticing beds each time he flew over them en route to the Omo Valley from his home in Nairobi. ⁴ Not that the French and Americans weren't collecting valuable information. They were. Hominid fossils were found in the lower Omo Basin, but the results were not nearly as spectacular as those achieved by Richard Leakey when he deserted Omo for the area east of Lake Rudolf, nor did the fragmentary Omo finds mount a serious challenge to the prevailing theories of human evolution. ⁵

Lake Rudolf, Kenya

After a brief aerial reconnaissance in 1967, Richard Leakey launched the first East Rudolf Expedition in 1968. Almost as if on cue, four hominid specimens turned up forth with, harbingers of even better things to come. In the succeeding years, the expedition rapidly expanded to include European and American scientists. ⁶

Although most scientists tend to think of Africa as man's original home (a hypothesis tendered long ago by none less than Charles Dar win), today the Rift Valley is far from a Garden of Eden. The terrain is remote, harsh, and starkly inhospitable. The East Rudolf Expedition represents, first of all, a triumph of logistics and dedication. The sediments being explored are exposed in five main regions scattered over an area of about 2,000 square kilometers. The area is hundreds of arduous miles from supplies in the near est town, and hours from so basic a commodity as drinking water. To add injury to insult, the main camp has to be maintained in an "almost-constant gale." ⁷ However, many men would brave such conditions gladly, simply to add a new footnote to the record of man's past, let alone the whole new pages and chapters that are being compiled in East Africa.

The East Rudolf Expedition has been in the field every year since 1968. Geologists have worked hard to sort out and correlate the rock layers so that fossil finds can be arranged into a temporal sequence. Paleontologists have collected and analyzed innumerable fossil bones buried in the rock layers. Specialists in radioactive dating have collected scores of samples and attempted to provide absolute ages for the rock strata. Archeologists have collected hundreds of stone items interpreted as man-made artifacts from scores of sites. And, of course, hominid fossils have been found—every year still more.

In the 1973-1975 field seasons (subsequent to the 1972 discovery of Skull 1470) forty-nine hominid specimens were found. ^8,9 This raised the number recovered by the expedition to 136. Leakey classifies the majority of these as australopithecines, but several are classified as Homo (man). The more significant specimens classified by Leakey as Homo include a mandible, a hipbone, a fragmentary skull, and another more complete skull. These new remains of man seem to be similar to the kind of man represented by Skull 1470 and confirm his contemporaneity with Australopithecus in the East Rudolf study area.

The Laetolil beds in Tanzania

Since the discovery of Skull 1470, hominid finds have been made in two widely separated areas. One is in northern Ethiopia in the Afar triangle; the other is far to the south in the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. The Laetolil beds of the Serengeti are located about thirty miles south of the famous Olduvai Gorge site. Fossils had previously been collected in the area, including a hominid specimen, but it wasn't until 1974 that an intensive search for hominid fossils was launched by Mary Leakey. ¹⁰

Mary Leakey's renewed interest in the Laetolil beds was sparked by recognition that these beds underlay the lowest beds she and her husband had studied in Olduvai Gorge. ¹¹ Barring such complications as severe folding, overturning, or thrust faulting of the rock layers, deeper means "older" in geology (how much older is another matter); therefore, Mary Leakey saw the Laetolil beds as an opportunity to trace the evolution of man further back into time than was possible in Olduvai Gorge. She was strengthened in this viewpoint by the results of radioactive dates obtained on volcanic rock within and above the Laetolil beds. The dates were older than the dates obtained from Olduvai Gorge. ¹²

The antiquity of these dates has triggered special interest by scientists in the thirteen hominid specimens found in the Laetolil beds, especially since Mary Leakey at tributes the specimens to the genus Homo (not Australopithecus). ¹³ Whatever their true absolute age (radioactive dates tend to fall be tween 3.59 and 3.77 million!), the fossils would seem to be among the most ancient remains of true man ever discovered. Unfortunately, the fossils are fragmentary, consisting of jawbone fragments and teeth. ¹⁴ Because body and head bones are missing, it is hard to make much headway with interpretation. But the specimens do seem to be quite similar to some of the finds made in the Hadar region of Ethiopia.

The Hadar region, Ethiopia

Leakey's group has enjoyed continued success in the East Rudolf area since 1972, but the most spectacular discoveries since the unveiling of Skull 1470 come from the northern end of the African Rift Valley. Exploration of the Hadar region north of Addis Ababa in the drainage of the Awash River began in earnest in I973. ¹⁵

Although the blistered and baked badlands that comprise the Hadar region may strike one as hellish (Expedition Leader Johanson's first visit to the region was on a nice April day when the temperature was a mere 120 degrees!), ¹⁶ it is indisputably a "heaven" for fossil hunters. In the first two field sessions, the expedition amassed more than 6,000 fossil specimens, including bones from seventeen hominid individuals, and the 1975 field season yielded many more. ¹⁷ The geology, radioactivity, and fossil mammal species of the Harar rocks ally them closely to the Laetolil beds and to rocks in the lower Omo Basin. Hence the hominids appear to be of comparable antiquity to the oldest fossils from Omo and Laetolil. ¹⁸

The Hadar finds are of stunning quality compared to most previous discoveries. Unusually ideal depositional conditions have allowed preservation of many fossils, even crocodile and turtle eggs, in a virtually complete state. ¹⁹ It must be remembered that previous finds consist mainly of bits and pieces—mostly isolated teeth and jaws or jaw fragments. Bones from the body are rare and fragmental. But out of the Hadar region have come splendid body bones—leg, arm, feet, hand, and hip bones—as well as the usual jaws. ²⁰ For the first time, a large portion of a single skeleton has been found. The skeleton is 40 per cent complete and preserves decisive evidence concerning posture and locomotion. "Lucy" appears to be a female australopithecine. Startling is the small size of this individual—only three and one-half feet tall. Yet she is decidedly upright in posture and biped in gait. ²¹ . This one find renders obsolete reams of scholarly articles debating australopithe cine characteristics.

A second sensational discovery was made in 1975 when Johanson and his colleagues stumbled on a "family" of hominid fossils, three to five adults and two infants, which evidently perished together. ²² This group of associated fossils offers unprecedented opportunities for posing hitherto unanswerable questions concerning aspects of growth and contemporaneous variation in early man. Unlike Lucy, this group of fossils is said to be the remains of true man. At least eighty-six additional hominid finds have been made. Significantly, Homo fossils in the Hadar region are turning up in the deepest, hence oldest, layers of the Harar rock sequence and predate, or are contemporaneous with, the australopithecines. ²³

The new finds provide convincing, perhaps conclusive, answers to some questions, but they also raise a swarm of new questions. For one thing, we can declare with greater confidence that the australopithecines are not the long-sought "missing link." The once-tidy tapestry of evolution from ape to man by way of Australopithecus may be irretrievably frayed. Certainly the keystone in the fossil evidence for single-line age hominid evolution has fallen—and it can never be restored. Scientists are even now searching for new evolutionary models of human origins. Biblical literalists, of course, will not join in this search, but will instead be reaffirming confidently the creationist model found in the early chapters of Genesis. However, as we shall see in Part 2, the new finds offer plenty of challenge for conservative creationists too. Prayerful, rigorous, and creative thought will be necessary in order to fit all the recent discoveries into the old, but ever new, Biblical story of "the way we were."

(Concluded in May issue.)