Word: leakey
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...making their persuasive case for Ramapithecus as the first hominid, Simons and Pilbeam dispute a competing claim by the Kenyan anthropologist, Louis Leakey. Two years ago Leakey announced that 20 million-year-old fossils that he had discovered near Africa's Lake Victoria and dubbed Kenyapithecus africanus belonged to the earliest known manlike creature (TIME, Feb. 3, 1967). After applying their dental tests' to casts of Leakey's prehistoric fragments, the Yalemen decided that Kenyapithecus lacked the characteristics of early man. Though Leakey still insists that Kenyapithecus is a hominid, most other scientists now believe that...
...also close kin to a pygmy-sized creature called Homo Habilis. Last week Leakey's anthropologist wife, Mary, unveiled the most intact habilis skull ever found. It was dug up in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, and is about 1,750,000 years...
...earliest ancestors, says Anthropologist Louis Leakey, was a puny creature named Kenyapithecus africanus that inhabited the earth 20 million years ago. Bones that Leakey found in his native Kenya are the basis of this conclusion. But they also raise a troubling question. How did the weakling those bones belonged to ever survive his hostile environment? He would have been no match for faster and more powerful carnivorous beasts, such as the forebears of lions and leopards, and man did not begin making weapons capable of warding off attacks from big cats until about 2,000,000 years...
...answer, Leakey has been telling audiences on his current U.S. speaking tour, may be simply that predatory animals cannot stomach man unless they are desperately hungry. "Nature endowed us, like the shrews," he says, "with something of either a nasty taste or smell...
Back in Kenya, Leakey has seen hungry lions walk through camps past sleeping, defenseless men to stalk and kill nearby antelope. On the rare occasions when they do kill a man, he says, they merely sniff at his body and walk away in disgust with nary a taste. He also notes that the big cats feast on baboons but generally disdain chimpanzees, which are closer relatives of man and presumably give off their version of the manlike odor that these predators find so unattractive. "To this odor," Leakey believes, "we owe our survival. Man is not cat food...