The Path Not Taken

In 1959, paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found the cranium of an extinct hominin in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge. The discovery caused a sensation, with the newspapers of the day dubbing the find Nutcracker Man. The skull’s molars and jaws were massive, and scholars hotly debated how it fit into the story of human evolution. The cranium was eventually classified as belonging to a previously unknown hominin, Paranthropus boisei. For six decades after Leakey’s discovery, however, only a handful