At a widely publicized news conference in August of 1972, Dr. Jeffrey Bada of Scripps Institute of Oceanography announced the "discovery" of a new dating method based on the rate of racemization of amino acids in fossil material.

This article originally appeared in the June 1974 Acts & Facts. Please note that new discoveries in this area may have been made since that time.

It is too early to assess with any degree of confidence the true import of recent finds by Richard Leakey near the east shore of Lake Rudolf in Kenya. Nevertheless, the impact on evolutionary theories related to the origin of man is potentially so explosive, these reports merit, even at this early date, a tentative evaluation.

There is the theory that all living things have arisen through a naturalistic, mechanistic evolutionary process from a single source, which itself arose by a similar process from a dead, inorganic world. This general evolutionary hypothesis is usually presented as an established scientific fact in science textbooks.