Word: ancestors
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Died. Bradford Smith, 55, historian and biographer, who in nine impressively documented books (Bradford of Plymouth, Captain John Smith) retraced the paths of early American history and came to some surprising conclusions: that William Bradford (an ancestor) had aimed the Mayflower at New England, not Virginia, as historians supposed, and that Captain John Smith (no kin) was indeed saved by Pocahontas, a tale long suspected as too tall to be true; of cancer; in Shaftsbury...
...been suggested that Harvard's Commencement, the ancestor of all American academic ceremonies and quite distinct from those of Europe, is the United States' chief contribution to higher education. If an undergraduate cannot find distinction in the Harvard curriculum, he can be sure it will appear in the ceremony of the parting...
Died. Hamilton Basso, 59, journalist-novelist, a gentlemanly scholar from New Orleans who exiled himself to Connecticut in 1944, but kept trying to go home again with leisurely re-creations of the South's social distinctions, ancestor worship and tribal customs (from lynching to channel bass fishing), most successfully in his 1954 bestseller, The View from Pompey's Head; of cancer; in New Haven, Conn...
...Leakey wants to call this up-and-coming pygmy Homo habilis, or skillful man, and recognize him as a direct ancestor of modern man. He thinks that a prehuman creature called Kenyapithecus lived in East Africa 12 million years ago and evolved into Homo habilis and at least two other different types, notably Australopithecus and erectus, a near man that includes both Java and Peking man. From Homo habilis, Leakey believes, are descended both Neanderthal man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens). His theory, if correct, would trace man's ancestry back to the Pliocene...
...Like his ancestor, whom he calls, "my patron saint--the rest of the Pettigrews were real bastards"--Pettigrew is a rebel, and loves it. On the day he was to testify before the Boston School Committee on the psychological effects of school segregation, he told a class that he hoped Committeewoman Mrs. Louise Day Hicks would charge him with being an outside agitator...