Word: ancients
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...human ancestors certainly did. Less than a year after A. ramidus made headlines, a team led by Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya (wife of well-known fossil hunter Richard Leakey) and Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University revealed that it too had found fossils of an ancient human ancestor at two sites near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Not only is the new hominid very old, dating to 4.2 million years B.P., but it is similar in some ways to A. afarensis--though clearly more primitive. Given the family resemblance, Leakey and Walker assigned the fossils...
...ancestor, White hints that his team has already discovered hominid fossils that are more than 5 million years old, though he refuses to elaborate before detailed studies are completed. But Leakey and Walker readily acknowledge that they are studying two 5.5 million-year-old hominid teeth and a similarly ancient jaw fragment with an embedded tooth from a site in northern Kenya. "They look like australopithecines with lots of primitive features," Walker says, but there isn't enough evidence from these fossils alone to claim a new species...
...that unfolds over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans appeared), or at an infinitude beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time--no geology, no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony evidence for human evolution, as described in the preceding pages, surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar's life...
...shadowed corner of the lobby at the National Press Club, someone set up a relic for display. Cast iron, with its maker's mark riveted to the front, the ancient Teletype machine looks ready to do battle once again after little more than a nap, spitting out headlines to chain-smoking reporters, getting even the most hard-boiled excited as it prints out "Flash...!" Anyone who stops to look closer at the immovable museum piece will see another quaint reminder of a time gone by in the newspaper business: the Teletype is stamped United Press International...
...part of the explanation of the appeal of this madness may be that it returns our soft, comfy civilization to an ancient roughness--man vs. nature, life or death, that sort of thing. The recent successes of stories like The Perfect Storm, Into Thin Air and The Endurance would suggest that the E-ZPass, "we deliver" world is yearning--if only in its dreams--for situations of hardship and danger. Death doesn't even seem to attend war anymore; Kosovo showed that a push-button war could be casualty-free, at least for those who pushed the buttons. Routine phrases...