Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Percival's surprise, the volunteers, "who had sat on their asses most of their lives," coped gracefully with primitive life. Building the communal hut took more than two months. Using ancient tools, the group chopped wood for 72 rafters, fashioned a conical thatched roof and sides out of wattle (interwoven hazel branches) and daub (mud and animal hair). Making a loaf of bread the Celtic way took nearly a day. Fashioning clay storage pots took longer, and the early pottery tended to crack over the fire-until the novices got the hang of their craft. Says Helen Elphick...
...amusement, the Iron Agers told stories, played the lyre, pipe and drums, and competed at "Nine Men's Morris," an ancient board game. Sarah Rockcliff, who dearly missed her afternoon tea, made do with brews of dandelion or mint...
...dramatic scenario occurred nearly 4 million years ago in East Africa's Great Rift Valley. But last week it was vividly recalled by Anthropologist Mary Leakey, who announced that she and her co-workers had found new and revealing traces of our early roots at the site of that ancient African spa: the actual footprints of one of those man-apes. Radioactive dating showed that the prints had been made some 3.59 million to 3.75 million years ago, a hint the creature may be the oldest-known direct ancestor...
...hunch that "we didn't look hard enough," Mary returned to Laetolil. She soon began finding jawbones, teeth and other fossils that were clearly of hominid (manlike) origin. She and her coworkers, including her son Philip, also discovered thousands of fossilized tracks under a layer of ancient volcanic ash that had been eroded by seasonal water. Most were made by animals, but Philip, the younger brother of Anthropologist Richard Leakey (TIME Cover, Nov. 7), spotted several prints that apparently were left by a creature much higher on the evolutionary ladder...
While these ancient footprints shed fresh light on our nearer ancestors, Anthropologist Elwyn Simons, director of Duke University's primate center, revealed new findings on more distant kin. Most scientists agree that both man and ape descended from a common ancestor, a beast called Dryopithecus (meaning tree ape), which appeared in Africa some 20 million years ago. But who, or what, preceded it? As far back as 1963, Simons, then at Yale, began uncovering in the wind-scoured Fayum desert region, southwest of Cairo, bones of a likely candidate: a small, fox-sized, tree-inhabiting primate, which he dubbed Aegyptopithecus...