Henry Faul

Fossil skull of Zinjanthropus, nearly 2,000,000 years old, discovered in 1959 by Dr. L. S. B. Leakey in Olduvai Gorge. Accurate dating of this earliest human ancestor was possible by using the potassium-argon method.

One of the most talked-about age measurements in recent years was the determination of the unexpectedly great age of fossil ancestors of man, found by the British anthropologist, Dr. L. S. B. Leakey, in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The measurements were made by Garniss H. Curtis and Jack F. Evernden at the University of California in Berkeley by the potassium-argon method. The age came out a little less than 2 million years, about twice as old as it “should be” in the view of many scientists. Human remains of such great antiquity had never been found before, and much doubt was raised about the validity of the figures.

Time periods as short as two million years are not easy to measure by potassium-argon. The amount of argon produced in that time is extremely small, and contamination by argon from the air is a serious problem. Still, the measurements were repeated, the rocks were studied again, and the result did not change: The fossils were still about 2 million years old.

In cases like this, one tries to find some other method to check the results in an independent way. After many attempts it was discovered that the same rock strata dated by potassium-argon also contained some pumice—a porous volcanic glass—and that this glass was suitable for uranium fission-track dating. The measurements were made in the General Electric Research Laboratory. What was the result? Just about 2 million years!

When such altogether different techniques give the same number, one can have some confidence that the number is exact. It would be difficult to imagine a disturbance in nature that would cause these unrelated methods to give the same wrong number—in both cases by a factor of two. The double check simply means the Olduvai man is 2 million years old. There is not much doubt about it.

The Geologic Time Scale

Much of historical geology is based on a relationship called the LAW OF SUPERPOSITION. This simply means that when some rock formation was placed on top of some other formation by natural processes (sedimentation or volcanic eruption, for example), the layer on top must be younger than the one on the bottom. Such a conclusion may now seem obvious, but the concept was not even expressed until the very end of the eighteenth century and was still a matter of scientific controversy when Abraham Lincoln was a boy. It was the law of superposition, however, that led the early geologists to establish the first geologic time scales and to realize the enormous extent of geologic time.

In essence the system of establishing age by this concept is this: Somewhere a large and easily recognized layer of sedimentary rock was known. It had a characteristic color, texture, gross composition, and overall appearance. Let us call it bed M. This bed could be traced across the countryside until a place was reached where it could be seen that bed M rested on another, different layer of rock, which we might call bed L. Bed L could also be traced some distance and ultimately could be observed resting on a still different stratum, which we shall call bed K. Some of these beds had fossils in them, and it was eventually realized that rocks with the same kinds of fossils are of the same age, even though they may differ in other respects—in color or composition, for instance.

If bed M was followed in another direction, perhaps a point was reached where it dipped down a little, and here, was found still another layer—call it bed N—on top of M. Obviously, the sequence of beds from oldest to youngest was K-L-M-N. Their relative ages were now established. Over the years, hundreds of geologists described various rock layers and identified the fossils in them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this “layer-cake” structure of sedimentary rocks was well-known in western Europe. (One may say, parenthetically, that America was geologically a vast unknown at that time. Today we know much more about the geology of Antarctica than anyone a hundred years ago knew about the geology of the United States.)