Two years ago, in a dry wash known as Kanapoi in Kenya, Harvard Paleontologist Bryan Patterson was poking around for old bones when he came upon what looked like a routine fragment. "I said to myself, 'Ho hum, there's another knuckle bone,' " Patterson told a news conference in Cambridge, Mass., last week. Actually, it was a bit of serendipity. After laboratory analysis of the radioactive decay in the lava surrounding the bone, Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology determined that the bone must be 2,500,000 years old. Since it is a piece of humerus, or upper arm, conforming remarkably to the skeletal structure of modern man, the Kanapoi hominid apparently lived 750,000 years earlier than Homo habilis, previously thought to be man's oldest direct ancestor known to have walked erect. Alas, the Kanapoi hominid probably didn't live very long. "The lake there teemed with crocodiles," said Patterson. . . .

Beautification begins at home for Lady Bird Johnson. She's proved that handsomely already by garlanding many a nook and cranny of Washington with daffodils and cherry trees. Now her Committee for a More Beautiful Capital has come up with one of the more ambitious beautification schemes since Kubla Khan landscaped Xanadu. Conceived by Landscape Architect Lawrence Halprin, the master plan, to be executed with some $15 million in public and private contributions, would turn the city's labyrinthine back alleys into pedestrian greenways or community plazas, vacant lots into vest-pocket parks, and dreary asphalt into brick or patterned pavement. Like Lady Bird, who is now on the list for the first time, Washington ought to become one of the ten best dressed in the world.

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Joan Kennedy, 30, Senator Teddy's wife, expects her third child in June, which will make old Joe and Rose proud grandparents for the 26th time.

It was a minor miracle last month when British Yachtsman Francis Chichester, 65, slid into Australia's Sydney harbor after sailing all alone in his 53-ft. ketch Gipsy Moth IV for 14,000 miles from England by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Chichester arrived safe, happy, and exhausted after 105 days at sea. This week, Chichester will set out alone once more, heading for England by way of the perilous route around South America's Cape Horn, whose vicious seas and fickle winds have destroyed many a fully manned vessel. Back home, another old salt, Captain Alan Villiers, who skippered a replica of the Mayflower from England to Massachusetts in 1957, thought that this was tempting providence too far. "I have begged Chichester not to attempt it," said Villiers. "God has been very good to him and very patient. This is asking too much of God."

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In a speech before the American Football Coaches Association in Hous ton, the New York Stock Exchange's retiring president, Keith Funston, 56. did a bit of recruiting for the bulls and the bears. "The values so essential to success on the gridiron are highly prized in business," Funston evangelized, inviting the nation's college-football players to try out for slots in the securities business. Like ideal businessmen, he said, football players are possessed of self-confidence, imagination, leadership and competitive spirit. Funston had better watch out. As a rule, the lads are also big and mean and pretty good at faking.

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At the United Nations he may sometimes seem a dogmatic hardliner. It turns out that Soviet Ambassador Niko lai Fedorenlco, 54, is also reasonably good with the one-liners. He showed up on TV's Merv Griffin show, brandish ing a thick Havana cigar, which made him look as if he'd learned his Marx from Groucho. As he mentioned Channel 5, the station that broadcasts the show in New York, he grinned: "My wife likes Channel 5 (applause) . . . Chanel 5 from Paris, you know [laughter)."

Some 1,800 fans of the grand old opera gathered at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria for a celebration of his 65th birthday. "There are many virtues in growing old," General Manager Rudolf Bing told the members of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. After a dour pause, he added: "I'm just trying to think what they are."

Her husband, Producer Carlo Ponti, sat anxiously at her bedside in a Rome clinic, refusing to see even close friends. Finally he did tell one of them: "There is nothing to worry about." Unhappily, there was. That night Actress Sophia Loren, 32, in the fifth month of pregnancy, suffered a miscarriage, her second in two years.

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One of the faces was missing from the portrait gallery at the Department of Interior after Albert B. Fall, Warren Harding's Secretary of the Interior, was convicted in 1929 of accepting a $100,000 bribe to lease some California oil lands to a drilling company. Officials removed his picture from the pantheon of former Secretaries and carted it off to storage. There it remained through the years, while Fall fought an appeal through the courts, eventually served a one-year jail term in 1931 and died a broken man in 1944. Last week Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall had the painting brought back to hang outside his office. Explained Udall: "I simply felt that he was entitled as a former Secretary to have his portrait hanging with those of other Secretaries."

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