Word: anthropologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...monkey, thought Paleontologist Alan Walker as he plucked the skull fragment from a gully west of Kenya's Lake Turkana. But that was no monkey. The bone belonged to a 2.5 million-year-old ape-man called Australopithecus boisei. The discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue of Nature. Leakey's excitement...
Most scientists agree that the small-brained australopithecines were the first manlike creatures to walk upright, 3.5 million or more years ago, and that their evolution ran parallel to that of humanity's direct ancestors. The dispute arises over details. Some researchers, including Anthropologist Donald Johanson, director of the Berkeley-based Institute of Human Origins, think that a single species, Australopithecus afarensis, which includes the celebrated 3 million-year-old skeleton called Lucy, was the common ancestor of all later australopithecines, as well as man. The two branches, they say, split about 3 million years ago, with the Australopithecus line...
...enough energy to give their children more than just a good-night kiss. It helps that more men are willing to lend a hand with housework and child rearing. Even so, men are far more likely than women to have it both ways, both flat-out career and kids. Anthropologist Patricia McBroom, who teaches women's studies at Rutgers, cites research that shows that 60% of executive women have no children, vs. only 3% of their male counterparts...
Locusts and termites are unlikely candidates for an American dinner menu, but they are high-protein foods that nourish many Africans who, argues Anthropologist Marvin Harris, make such choices by preference that developed from necessity. Seemingly bizarre culinary customs are revealed as plain common sense by the author in an insightful and intriguing new book, Good to Eat (Simon & Schuster; $17.95). Citing economic, ecological and health considerations as forerunners of religious, folkloric and even social eating customs, Harris writes, "When India's Hindus spurn beef, Jews and Moslems abominate pork, and Americans barely avoid retching at the thought...
...theatrical poses. Simon's favorite getup is a long gray raincoat, a gold borsalino hat and black stockings. At 15 she is a live-in helper for a Greenwich Village dermatologist and his family. The Bergsons appreciate culture with a capital K, and the baby-sitter, already an amateur anthropologist, enjoys watching their games. Available evidence suggests that the doctor was a pretentious cad and an ideal target for Simon's elegantly decapitating style. "He had, or had invented," she writes, "an aristocratic European background, replete with 'von' relatives, a faint 'Continental' accent that slipped when he was angry, forgetting...