Word: ancestors
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...natural disasters wreak havoc: the U.S. 1890 Census was almost completely wiped out in a fire, and Southern courthouses were burned in the Civil War. The public records office in Dublin, Ireland, was destroyed in a fire in 1922. And in China's Cultural Revolution, the centuries-old ancestor records compiled by villages were declared "feudal garbage." In India, where most vital statistics are still unrecorded, rare documents are at Hindu holy spots where priests, known as pundits, write down births, deaths and marriages. But the documents, narrow sheaves of paper tied in cloth, are crumbling from...
...several generations had a family member with the middle name Lee or Lea in honor of the general. It turned out that his great-great-great-grandfather had been an admirer, not a relative, of Lee's. In fact, as he went back, Stokes found his first American ancestors were indentured servants. "We came to America basically as white slaves," he says, with a laugh. Lately, Harold Brooks-Baker--head of Burke's Peerage, the British company that does genealogical searches--sees a change. People are less obsessed with nobility and more with the dramatic. "If their ancestor...
Human beings and the great apes had a common ancestor about 5 million years ago. The genes of the two groups differ hardly at all, but some of them are differently arranged. By using that information, along with hominid fossils, we shall learn what genetic changes made it possible for the ancestors of modern people to stand upright (about 4 million years ago) and then to speak. As a by-product, we shall be able to trace the migration routes of our human ancestors who emigrated from Africa and came to populate the surface of the earth. A half-century...
...Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge, Mary Leakey finds the fossilized skull of a human ancestor who lived 1.8 million years...
...Hadar, Ethiopia, Donald Johanson and colleagues find a 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of a new human ancestor, later called Australopithecus afarensis; it is nicknamed Lucy...