Discovery
Mary and Louis Leakey had conducted excavations in Tanzania since the 1930s, though most such work was postponed due to the outbreak of World War II. They returned in 1951, finding mostly ancient tools and fossils of extinct mammals for the next few years. On the morning of July 17, 1959, Louis felt ill and stayed at camp while Mary went out to Bed I's Frida Leakey Korongo (korongo is Swahili for gully; this one was named after Louis's ex-wife). Sometime around 11:00 a.m., she noticed a piece of bone that "seemed to be part of a skull" which had a "hominid look".
After dusting some topsoil away and finding "two large teeth set in the curve of a jaw", she drove back to camp exclaiming "I've got him!" They created a pile of stones around the exposed portion of the fossil to protect it from the weather. Active excavation began the following day; they had chosen to wait for photographer Des Bartlett to arrive so that a photographic record of the entire process of removal could be made. A partial cranium was fully unearthed August 6, though it had to be reconstructed from its fragments which were scattered in the scree.
Once he had examined the cranium, Louis determined it to be subadult, or adolescent, based on its dentition, and he and Mary began to call it "Dear Boy". He also believed that it was of a species ancestral to modern humans but a member of the subfamily Australopithecinae. In describing the fossilized hominid in his journal, Louis initially considered the classification Titanohomo mirabilis (wonderful Titan-like man), but he eventually dubbed their find Zinjanthropus boisei (East Africa man). Zinj is an ancient Arabic word for the East African coast; anthropus refers to the fossil's humanlike characteristics; and boisei refers to Charles Boise, who had been making financial contributions to the Leakeys' work since 1948. This classification was eventually revised to Paranthropus boisei, though this remains a matter of contention since the genus Paranthropus is disputed because of morphological similarities to Australopithecus. In either case, OH 5 is the holotype of its species.
Read more about this topic: OH 5
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)