Ancient Ape

By Frederic Golden

A 4 million-year-old human ancestor is unearthed in Ethiopia

Even on its tiptoes, the little creature stood hardly more than 4 1/2 ft. tall. Its brain was no larger than a chimpanzee's. But unlike its apish kin, it had a clearly human characteristic. It could walk upright, probably as well as modern man. Its arms gathered food, warded off foes and perhaps even made primitive tools. Yet the most remarkable thing about this tiny ape-man is its age. It lived some 4 million years ago, in what is now a forbidding corner of Africa called the Afar Triangle. If its discoverers are right, this ancient biped may be man's oldest direct ancestor, nearly half a million years more ancient than the previous claimant to that evolutionary honor.

Word of the discovery came last week from British-born Anthropologist J. Desmond Clark of the University of California at Berkeley. Says he: "I think we've got something both significant and extremely exciting." Although paleontologists often scrap as furiously over their bones as saber-toothed tigers, they do not disagree with Clark's assessment. "It's of tremendous potential," says Berkeley's F. Clark Howell, who has spent years fossil hunting in East Africa. Agrees Duke's Richard Kay: "A blockbuster."

The ape-man's bones provide impressive new evidence for what was once a radical evolutionary idea: that our primitive ancestors learned to walk upright before they developed large brains. Though it could walk and probably even run on its hind legs, the Afar creature's cranial capacity was pitifully small, totaling no more than about 400 cc, barely a fourth of the size of the brain of Homo sapiens. The meager skeleton shows no noticeable anatomical variations from the remains of another ancestor, the famed 3.6 million-year-old "Lucy," who has been regarded until now as man's oldest direct kin. Such evolutionary stability over some 400,000 years, argues Anthropologist Timothy White, Clark's Berkeley colleague, must be considered strong support for the emerging view that species change, not gradually, as the Darwinians contend, but in relatively short episodic bursts.

The history-making fossils were found last fall in the Awash River valley of the Afar desert in north-central Ethiopia, only 45 miles south of Lucy's burial grounds. Clark's 15-member expedition is the first scientific team to dig in the remote, fiercely inhospitable valley since the fighting between Ethiopia and Somalia began to ease three years ago. Even so, the scientists took protective measures, hiring Ethiopian game wardens and rifle-bearing Afar tribesmen who also toted knives half the size of machetes.

Over a period of ten days, the scientists turned up eight bone fragments from two different individuals. One, discovered last November by White, is the upper part of a left femur, or thighbone, about 6 in. long. A skilled anatomist, White was able to judge not only the was able to judge not only the creature's height but also its sex and age: male, about 16 or 17 years old. From markings showing where the muscles were attached to the bone, he also determined that this ancient teen-ager walked upright.

The other bones, uncovered about half a mile away from White's find, consist of seven skull fragments, all lying within 18 in. of one another. The discoverer was another expedition member, Leonard Krishtalka of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum. Remarkably, three of the fossils, including a frontal bone, which is especially useful in assessing the possible shape of the skull, easily fit together. The age of the bones was determined from radioactive dating of a layer of cindery volcanic debris near the fossils. The bones, declared Clark, are the oldest clearly identifiable hominid, or humanlike, skull fragments ever found.

Clark and White are a little less sure about giving the creature a species name. White will say only that it appears to be an older version of Lucy, which is perhaps the most irreverent appellation ever bestowed upon an important fossil. (The name was inspired by the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which the scientists were playing on a tape recorder the night of the find.) White, in any case, has every reason to be cautious. In 1979 he and the leader of the Lucy expedition, Anthropologist Donald Johanson, touched off a major anthropological controversy by lumping Lucy and other East African fossils into a single new species, which they called Australopithecus afarensis (apeman from Afar). These Lucy-type creatures, they said, were common ancestors of two distinct hominid lines--the australopithecines, which presumably died out, and the strain that 'led eventually to Homo sapiens.

Their proposal was quickly | disputed by Anthropologist Richard Leakey. He said that White and Johanson's large afarensis males and small females were more likely two entirely different species that lived side by side some 3 million years ago. The temper of the debate was not helped by Johanson's 1981 book Lucy, which discussed the activities of the Leakey family in an intimate, gossipy way. Though the discovery of what may be an older version of Lucy seems to bolster the case for afarensis, partisans on both sides of the debate agree that more fossils will have to be found before the issue is settled.

That additional evidence could also come from the Awash River valley. Last fall's expedition found the area Uttered with fossils -- remnants of elephants, hippos and pigs --some of them dating back 6 million years. Says Anthropologist Clifford Jolly of N.Y.U.: "There seems to be enough material there for 20 expeditions." One of them will be led by Clark. This fall, he plans to return to Awash in hopes of push ing "knowledge of human origins even deeper into the past." And perhaps un earthing even humbler skeletons in the human closet. -- By Frederic Golden. Reported by Tom Johnson/San Francisco

With reporting by Tom Johnson/San Francisco

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