Word: anthropologist
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Time: Nov. 30, 1974. Scene: the bleached and arid Afar Triangle of Ethiopia. Nothing about the desert seemed auspicious. Yet Anthropologist Donald Johanson had a premonition that this would be no ordinary morning. Shortly afterward, his hunch was ratified. The day was not merely unusual; it was epochal...
Given this finding, even the most stolid anthropologist could construct a story of suspense and revelation. But Johanson and Co-Author Maitland Edey are no standard scientists. Like polished mystery writers, they trace the many searches for origins and review the rivalries that have driven such scholarly sleuths as Louis, Mary and Richard Leakey. Since Johanson is driven by the same combination of curiosity, daring and egotism, Lucy is both enlivened and marred by a lack of objectivity. Johanson is convinced that he is now in sole possession of the truth about human roots-and perhaps...
...tiny (average height 5 ft.) Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are the oldest human inhabitants of southern Africa and one of the oldest distinct races of mankind. They speak a unique and difficult language, which one anthropologist describes as "an array of weird phonemes-clickings, croakings and raspings." They believe God hurled to earth a piece of turf that broke into pieces; the pieces became nations and the particles of dust their own minute, wandering tribe. Today only a few of the 55,000 remaining Bushmen still pursue their ancient way of life as nomadic hunters, tracking game across...
...They maintain that the decision rests entirely with the 35-member panel of judges that presided over the eight-week-long trial. Yet many Chinese are convinced that the politically explosive verdict is being handled by the highest officials of the Communist Party. Indeed, one member of the court, Anthropologist Fei Xiaotung, left Peking for a visit to Canada last week-a sure sign that the judges' participation was no longer necessary...
...course, nor the innovator always wrong. The desolate eternalist of Ecclesiastes ("There is no new thing under the sun") should be profoundly boring to anyone under 70. The problem is that values (these days, even elementary skills in how to raise children) vanish into the cracks between generations. Anthropologist Margaret Mead believed ten years ago that the West had entered an age so headlong in its rush toward the future that the old no longer had much of value to teach the young. Well, the future no longer seems quite so wildly original. But even in rigidly traditional epochs...