Abstract
THE conclusions at which Dr. Leakey, Dr. H. Reck, and Mr. A. T. Hopwood arrived in their recent investigation of the Oldoway Beds in relation to the antiquity of the human skeleton found in these deposits would appear to have received confirmation by a find at Kanam, a small native village on Lake Victoria. Here Dr. Leakey, it is reported in a dispatch from Nairobi which appeared in the Times of April 19, has discovered a lower jaw of Homo sapiens in deposits containing pre-Chellean implements and teeth of the same species of Deinotherium as was discovered at Oldoway. At Kanam, however, the beds in which the find was made correspond with the oldest of the Oldoway beds, whereas Oldoway man was found in Bed No. 2. Other finds reported from early Pleistocene deposits at Kanam are fragments of three human skulls, apparently washed out from deposits containing Chellean tools and remains of Elephas antiquus and Hipparion. At first sight, this find on Lake Victoria carries Homo sapiens back a stage further than the Oldoway discovery; but a more detailed account of the deposits and the conditions of the find must be awaited before a certain conclusion is possible. The difficulty of accepting a skeleton found entire, as was Oldoway man, as contemporary with the alluvial deposits in which it occurs—a difficulty already pointed out (NATURE, Feb. 27, p. 312)—is stressed in the current number of L'Anthropologie (t. 42, p. 214), where it is also suggested that the general conformation of the Oldoway skull points to an affinity with the modern Masai.
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Early Man in East Africa. Nature 129, 607 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129607a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129607a0