In 1972 Richard Leakey and his team discovered a curious skull, now catalogued as ER1470, and dated it to c. 2.6 million years ago. Leakey reconstructed it as a flat-faced, large-brained hominid and called it Homo habilis, though his co-worker Alan Walker doubted it was flat-faced, or even Homo [see The Wisdom of Bones by Walker and his wife Pat Shipman.] Now it seems Walker was on to something. Dr. Timothy Bromage has used the known developmental sequence of all mammal skeletons, especially the skull, to show that ER 1470 was reconstructed incorrectly, as reported by his University, NYU…
Man’s Earliest Direct Ancestors Looked More Apelike Than Previously Believed …though the title is slightly misleading as there’s some doubt about ER1470’s ancestral status.
Bromage presented his findings at the IADR meeting (March 23-27) in a poster, available here (warning 8.8 megabyte pdf) which is very interesting. The new ER1470 is much more apelike and has a brain capacity of just 526(+/-49) cc, versus the ~ 750 cc of Leakey’s original reconstruction. The new value is much the same as the lighter-built ER1813 skull, 510 cc, compared here with the old reconstruction of ER1470.
BTW fossil hominids have odd sounding catalogue numbers, but what “ER” means is the location of the find, East Rudolph (i.e. Lake Rudolph in Eastern Africa.)