Word: ancestors
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...American heroes mixed with natural-history specimens. When you think of Rauschenberg giving new life to a stuffed angora goat in Monogram, 1955, or repeatedly silk-screening the effigy of John F. Kennedy, there's some truth to this. But his closer affinity is with an equally polymorphous ancestor, Walt Whitman, the entranced celebrant of American variety...
Finding a new species of bird or bug is a little like finding a new use for duct tape--nice but not earthshaking. Finding a new species of human ancestor, on the other hand, is always a big deal. That's why Spanish scientists spent three years studying fossils they discovered at Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. They wanted to be sure of what they...
...Castro, of Madrid's Center for Scientific Investigation, and his colleagues maintain that their fossils belong to a new, possibly cannibalistic species of early man that roamed Europe nearly 800,000 years ago. Called Homo antecessor (from a Latin word meaning "explorer"), this creature may be the last common ancestor shared by modern humans and Neanderthals...
...very small boy, but the village elders remember him distinctly because his family was descended from a mandarin, the most famous citizen of the humble settlement of Paifangcun until, well, until the very small boy came along. The eminent ancestor had passed the torturous series of civil examinations to prove he was a master of the Confucian classics and thus fit to serve the Emperor in faraway Beijing. And the boy's forefather did just that, at the very height of empire, when the Sons of Heaven, as the Emperors were called, could afford to sneer at the Western barbarians...
...time the boy was born, in 1904, the empire was moribund, preyed upon by the very foreigners it despised. But the boy was remembered not just because he was a good student like his ancestor but because he liked to turn somersaults. He would roll out of his family compound, into footpaths and away into the countryside and then back home again, turning and turning and turning. And his life would be one of many somersaults: away from home, never to return, over the seas, into politics, into war, in and out of danger, in and out of power...