Scientist Fights Church Effort to Hide Museum's Pre-Human Fossils

One of the very first authors I read, some 15 years ago or more, concerning archaic humans and our subsequent floresence, was Richard Leakey, at a time when he was still working in the field, and publishing books as well - even today, the Leakey family are synonymous with some of the most famous fossil discoveries in East Africa. Olduvai Gorge, Lake Turkana and Laetoli are all names writ large across the annals of palaeoanthropology, opening up tiny vistas in to the vastness of our prehistory, affording us fleeting but compelling insights into our illustrious forebears.

Today, Richard Leakey no longer works out in the field - some years ago, he was the unfortunate victim of a plane crash, (I think he was the pilot of a small plane he used) which came to grief on one of his numerous trips into the remote areas of Kenya where he conducted his investigative excavations. He was then appointed to a position that gave him responsibility for the preservation and conservation of the wildlife of Kenya, as well as running the Kenya National Museum, but eventually quit after numerous arguments and disputes with the national government, i.e. his boss.

And now, after a quiet spell, he's back in the news again, and this time on a mission to do battle with a clerical elite who are demanding that the concept of human evolution should be abandoned, or at the very least, swept under the carpet. His latest adversary is the Pentecostal hierarchy, who object to the collection of human and australopithecine fossils of the Kenya National Museum being presented as evidence for human evolution.

"The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact," said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

"Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory," the bishop said.

The museum is currently closed for an 18-month renovation project, and is expected to open again in June 2007, whereupon Bishop Adoyo and other church representatives plan to petition the curators in an effort to persuade them "to force the museum to change its focus."

The article continues,

It was these comments Leakey termed outrageous. Calling members of the Pentecostal church fundamentalists, Leakey added: "Their theories are far, far from the mainstream on this. They cannot be allowed to meddle with what is the world's leading collection of these types of fossils."

If, as fundamentalists claim, evolution is just a theory, then there seems no reason why evolution could not be brought into the religious classroom, or be included as a separate book added on to the bible, to be taught as another belief system embraced by millions world-wide. The fact that this doesn't happen at the moment is because such ideas would not so much detract from any implicit religious concept of the emergence and purpose of life and intelligence, more that they would deprive them of precious time in which to preach their beliefs to an essentially captive audience.

Of course, evolution will never be taught in this context, as it would be objectionable to all concerned - scientists would protest that evolution was being de-coupled from its rightful connection to the scientific method - it's possible that some might regard it as an ideal opportunity to get their objective message across
to a subjective audience. However. it's likely many scientists would refuse to teach in the context of a religious environment under any circumstances.

Religious educators might take a similarly dim view of the idea, arguing that science leads away from doctrine, and vehemently discourages religious acceptance in any form - however, others might welcome an opportunity to engage in a dialogue between two seemingly irreconcilable sets of ideas.

As far as Richard Leakey is concerned, it must be frustrating to reach the end of his career only to find all that he has worked for is under threat from an unexpected direction. In the decades during which much of his career was spent, science to many appeared to be winning an ideological battle against what it considered to be the superstition of religion. The world had been riven by two disastrous world wars and countless other conflicts, and it may have been as a result of this that church attendance in the western world began to decline dramatically.

Other monotheistic practices continued, seemingly in the background to the western psyche, to whom the concept of fundamentalism was almost unknown up until the late 1970s, and the fall of the shah of Iran and the unstoppable rise of the ayatollahs. At the same time, Christian fundamentalism in the West, although extant, maintained a much lower profile than is the case today.

A new material world was being constructed, one that promised greater opportunity, more jobs but less arduous work, idyllic leisure time and a world of labour-saving gadgetry hitherto undreamed of. And to cap it all, we landed men on the Moon - the giant leap had been made, and we seemed set for the stars.

But instead of installing lunar bases and travelling to Mars, mankind seemingly opted instead to construct military training facilities from whence to launch quasi-religious warfare on an unprepared and secular world. Religion had embraced science in a big way, and has continued to so, having now extended its reach into cyberspace as well as the traditional terrestrial arenas of urban and rural conflict.

Additionally, we have slowly come to realise that the Earth itself is in the grip of a traumatic struggle as the Sixth Great Extinction slowly gathers momentum, aided and abetted by a human population, who whether deliberately or not, are 'racing towards an apocalypse of our own creation'

In this respect, Leakey represents entire generations of us who have grown up in a world of scientific promise that is perceived by many as having failed to deliver us from the darkened corridors of a threateningly dark and labyrinthine past into the silver super-cities basking in a glittering future.

Optimistic documentaries and programmes through the '70s, '80s and '90s have been broadcast to an eager public, thirsty for knowledge about our past, present and mooted future, seemingly content to let the theological teachings and moral promptings of two millennia slip quietly into the background.

Leakey also comes from a time when the TV documentary was a very different affair from its modern descendant, shot largely on location, with the occasional clip of an interview with the main archaeologists on site. Today of course, documentaries featuring ancient humans often have actors in costume re-enacting some or other imaginary situation, nearly all of which are uncannily unconvincing. Most of the archaic humans portrayed tend to be Neanderthals, strong, silent types with a habit of making many facial expressions of puzzlement, as if they're in a permanent state of not quite grasping what's going on around them.

But every time Homo sapiens appears on the scene, there's a little passage of narrative which ends with a slight pause, until the narrator says something like "...these people were Us!" or "....ourselves, Modern Man!", followed by a long booming timpanic roll, some blaring music and the surreal on-screen spectacle of the clouds suddenly zooming across the sky in fast-forward motion, (indicating the passage of Time), and which then brake hard as the Sun rises, indicating that Intelligence, in the guise of modern humans, has finally manifested itself upon the smilingly grateful face of Planet Earth.

What is overlooked is the fact that at the times when they first emerged, Neanderthals, heidelbergensis, Homo erectus et al, as well as various australopithecines were themselves at the very forefront of hominin innovation, each new release possessing an even more, (though occasionally less) impressive array of cognitive and technological abilities than the generation that preceded it. In the unlikely event I ever make a Neanderthal documentary, they will appear against a backdrop containing the full Moon set against a cloudless night sky. These symbols would be signifying the arrival of a sentient dark energy manifesting into the symbolic mind, that itself would go on to propel the expanding consciousness of mankind into the runaway mode in which we find it today.

My opening scene for the emergence of Homo erectus might involve them navigating across the open sea at 900,000 years b.p., en route to the Indonesian island of Flores, (later home to the Floresian 'hobbits') admittedly long after their actual inception, but providing a nice analogy that the human journey of exploration was sufficiently advanced to include the conquering of environments in ways never before attempted by living creatures on Earth. However, someone would doubtless want to include backing music along Hawaii Five-0 lines, which somehow wouldn't quite work.

Mainstream religion has in some ways taken a parallel, if not physical, path, evolving from a set of disparate belief sets and arcane ritual, involving a rich panoply of deities and assorted spirits, which have gradually been dispensed with, to a point where only a single figurehead of eternal omnipotence is considered worthy of worship.

So the light of spiritual enlightenment coupled with its scientific equivalent, should have combined to produce something that was even brighter - instead, the result so far has been sonic in aspect, a deafening cacophony of bitter accusation and recrimination, fuelled by the deep resentments of two mighty adversaries engaged in a fight to the death, as they bid to gain control of a world, its opinions and ultimately its very soul.

Moreover, the 'photons' of religion and science have both acquired physical mass at an accelerated rate, which has transformed into physical matter in the guise of arms and associated weaponry, which in this current and intellectually stormy climate will almost inevitably collide head-on, perhaps producing an incandescence of light more readily associated with the deployment and detonation of nuclear materiel.

In an ideal world, people like Richard Leakey should have been left to spend his twilight years with his feet up, contentedly puffing smoke-rings of achievement across a clear blue sky, instead of which, and in a manner more akin to a latter-day and anthropological version of Douglas Bader, he will tap out the embers of his pipe, shove it into his jacket pocket, before firing up the engine, to once more do battle with yet another belief system that threatens to shut us down for ever.

Leakey Foundation

image Olduvai Gorge