Word: ancestors
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...story on the discovery of a new apelike human ancestor that walked upright induced monkeyshines in many of you. "Some of my forebears may have hung by their necks," chuckled a Los Angeles reader, "but none ever hung by their tails." A Kentuckian averred that "the evolutionary process has evidently gone into reverse. The scientists have devolved into baboons." And a South Carolina man hoped that "since TIME has firmly established our lineage, we may begin paying for our subscriptions in bananas...
...answering both these questions. Working as part of an international team led by U.S. and Ethiopian scientists, a graduate student named Yohannes Haile-Selassie (no relation to the Emperor), enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, has found the remains of what appears to be the most ancient human ancestor ever discovered. It's a chimp-size creature that lived in the Ethiopian forests between 5.8 million and 5.2 million years ago--nearly a million and a half years earlier than the previous record holder and very close to the time when humans and chimps first went their separate evolutionary...
...detailed anatomy of these fragmentary fossils, especially the teeth, that convinced Haile-Selassie that he had discovered a new human ancestor. Although apelike, the lower canines and upper premolars, in particular, display certain traits found only in the teeth of later hominids--the term scientists use to describe ourselves and our non-ape ancestors. They also differ in shape from the teeth of all known fossil and modern apes. Even the way in which the teeth had been worn down was telling. Explains Haile-Selassie's thesis adviser, Berkeley paleontologist Tim White: "Apes all sharpen their upper canines as they...
...basis of these minor but distinctive differences, Haile-Selassie decided to classify the new human ancestor as a subspecies, or variant, of ramidus and has given it the name Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba. (The name is derived from the local Afar language. Ardi means ground or floor; ramid means root; and kadabba means basal family ancestor. In accordance with the sometimes bizarre nomenclature of science, the younger creature now gets renamed Ardipithecus ramidus ramidus...
...like. But they do know it was about the size of modern common chimpanzees, which when standing average about 4 ft. tall. That makes it roughly the same size as its close relative A. ramidus ramidus and about 20% taller than Lucy, the famous 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor discovered about 50 miles away in 1974 that is even further along the evolutionary track. The size of kadabba's brain and the relative proportions of its arms and legs were probably chimplike as well...