Word: anthropologists
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Dreaming: Shirley Strum says that there came a time when the baboons spoke to her in English. They came to her in her dreams and asked for her help. For twelve years Strum, an anthropologist from California, had been studying a baboon troop at a ranch called Kekopey, near Gilgil. Then the ranch was turned into an agricultural collective, and the new farmers menaced the baboons and tried to kill them...
...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...
...This skull is the most exciting find since Lucy," says Eric Delson, an anthropologist at the City University of New York's Lehman College. "Relationships among australopithecines will need to be somewhat revised." That will not surprise anthropologists. Although the current diagram of humanity's family tree is based on thousands of specimens, most of them are frustratingly incomplete. Walker's fossil may force a revision in the textbooks, but it is not likely to be the last...
...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...