Abstract
ON March 18–19 a conference summoned by the Royal Anthropological Institute met at St. John's College, Cambridge, under the presidency of Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, to receive reports on the human skeletal remains discovered by Dr. Leakey's archæological expedition to East Africa in the autumn of last year. On the geological, palæontological, archæological and anatomical evidence, the findings of the respective committees are:—(1) That it is clear that the two fragments said to have been found in situ at Kanjera belong to the original deposit and that the fragments cannot have been introduced into the calcareous deposits at a later date; (2) that the fragment of human lower jawbone from Kanam is derived from a deposit of lower Pleistocene age, while the fauna from the Kanjera deposits, in which the cranial fragments were found, cannot be later than the middle Pleistocene; (3) that the cranial remains from Kanjera show no character inconsistent with reference to the type of Homo sapiens, special points noted being the absence of any frontal torus and a thickness of bone not present in any non-pathological modern skull and comparable with that of the Piltdown and Boskop skulls: while the Kanam jaw shows no appearance incompatible with its inclusion in the type of Homo sapiens or with the high antiquity assigned to it; and (4) that the Kanam jaw is associated with a pebble industry, comparable to Oldoway Bed I, which has no precise counterpart in western Europe; and the Kanjera skull with a Chellean industry corresponding with that of the upper part of Oldoway Bed II, the pebble industry of Bed I being older than the Chellean industry from Bed II, while the latter corresponds typologically to industries from deposits of early Pleistocene age in Europe.
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Early Man in East Africa. Nature 131, 427 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131427c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131427c0