ABSTRACT
The type of Australopithecus boisei was discovered at Olduvai Gorge in 1959 by M. D. Leakey. L. S. B. Leakey (1959) originally named it Zinjanthropus boisei and Robinson (1960) immediately proposed that it should be Paranthropus boisei. OH 5 became the subject of an exhaustive monograph by Tobias (1967) as Australopithecus boisei. Until recently, most authorities except Robinson have accepted that the genus Australopithecus could serve to hold both East and South African “ robust” species as well as Australopithecus africanus, but there is developing a fashion to use Paranthropus again for the “ robust” group (e.g., Grine, 1985; Dean, 1985, 1986; Clarke, 1977, 1985; Olson, 1985). Despite nomenclatural differences, practically everyone has viewed A. boisei as being just a northern species that was perhaps a little more “ robust” than A. robustus. They have often been considered together in phylogenetic reconstruction as A. robustus/boisei or A. robustus + boisei (e.g., White et al., 1981; Kimbel et al., 1984; Skelton et al., 1986) as though the relationship between them is well-known and that they are a clade. In Rak’s (1983) study of the australopithecine face he developed a scheme whereby the A. boisei condition was derived from the A. robustus one. Recent discoveries of hominid fossils in the Turkana Basin, Kenya (Walker et al., 1986; Leakey and Walker, 1988) have focused our attention on the relationships between the East and South African species and have also helped us to understand some enigmatic fossils from earlier in the stratigraphic record. It is a measure of the significance of these new fossils that some members of the Workshop that led to this volume now consider that A. boisei and A. robustus might have evolved many of their common features in parallel.
