Word: anthropologist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Thor Heyerdahl, 63, the Norwegian anthropologist, explorer and adventurer, believes in dramatizing his theories. To show that the Polynesian islands could have been settled by ancient mariners from South America, he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft. To demonstrate that Egyptians might have reached the New World centuries before Columbus, he conquered the Atlantic in a boat made of papyrus. Now Heyerdahl is about to take a reed boat down the Tigris River from the purported site of the biblical Garden of Eden, eventually reach the open sea and either sail to India or East Africa, or sink-whichever...
...this pursuit, Leakey's team has turned up at the Turkana site alone more than 300 fossilized bone specimens, from an estimated 1 80 of man's ancestors. All told, during a decade-long Leakey has found more and better pre-man and early man fossils than any other anthropologist. His work has helped upset many held ideas on evolution and has forced science to write a new sce nario for man's slow progress from ape to Shakespeare's "paragon of animals," Homo sapiens...
...Raymond Dart, the South African anthropologist, found a startlingly different skull embedded in a piece of limestone from a quarry at Taung?Tswana for "place of the lion"?about 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Kimberley. Dart determined that the skull had come from a five-year-old primate (the order of mammals that includes humans, apes and monkeys) who had lived on the threshold of humanity. Still, he recognized that the creature was even more primitive than Java man. He named it Australopithecus africanus, or the southern ape of Africa. The skull displayed an odd blend...
These developments, probably more than any others, hastened the differentiation between man and earlier hominids. Explains Anthropologist Charles Kimberlin ("Bob") Brain of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, South Africa: "Meat eating and hunting were important factors. If you remained a vegetarian, the necessity for culture was not nearly as great." Richard Leakey too believes that hunting helped to make emerging man a social creature. Says he: "The hominids that thrived best were those able to restrain their immediate impulses and manipulate the impulses of others into cooperative efforts. They were the vanguard of the human race...
...over Lake Natron in northern Tanzania, he spotted what looked like interesting sediment beds and, encouraged by his parents, set off to explore the area. His first expedition proved to be a success; the team he assembled found a fragment from an Australopithecus robustus. He decided to become an anthropologist...