Word: aped
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...larger than a chimpanzee's. But unlike its apish kin, it had a clearly human characteristic. It could walk upright, probably as well as modern man. Its arms gathered food, warded off foes and perhaps even made primitive tools. Yet the most remarkable thing about this tiny ape-man is its age. It lived some 4 million years ago, in what is now a forbidding corner of Africa called the Afar Triangle. If its discoverers are right, this ancient biped may be man's oldest direct ancestor, nearly half a million years more ancient than the previous claimant...
...ape-man's bones provide impressive new evidence for what was once a radical evolutionary idea: that our primitive ancestors learned to walk upright before they developed large brains. Though it could walk and probably even run on its hind legs, the Afar creature's cranial capacity was pitifully small, totaling no more than about 400 cc, barely a fourth of the size of the brain of Homo sapiens. The meager skeleton shows no noticeable anatomical variations from the remains of another ancestor, the famed 3.6 million-year-old "Lucy," who has been regarded until...
Cracking jokes about this $12 million "science fantasy adventure" must seem like pulling the leg of a museum dinosaur-an unfairly anarchic response to an enterprise so painstaking, so educational, so forthrightly solemn. Director Annaud even recruited Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) to devise appropriate gestures for the actors, and Anthony Burgess (Language Made Plain) to create primitive dialects, all heavy on the grunts and gutturals. But jokes will come, especially since Quest for Fire emerges less than a year after Caveman, a goofy romp through prehistory that managed to supply the punch lines to many of Quest...
...Kalahari, who live much as man's earliest ancestors did, foraging for vegetables, sharing meat when they hunt successfully, carrying their culture in their heads. His conclusion is refreshingly optimistic: there is no proof in the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari that man is an inherently violent "killer ape." The modern urge to mass violence appears to be acquired, not inherited...
...paintings like Dignity and Impudence, circa 1839, he projected Victorian ideas about social hierarchy and decorum onto animals-partly to satirize human behavior (though very lightly), and mainly to suggest that the divisions of the Victorian world were rooted in the natural order. Art may be the ape of nature; but dogs, so to speak, are the apes of morality. Animals want to be men and imitate the better aspects of human behavior-fidelity, tenacity, bravery, gentleness. They cannot make the last evolutionary step, but how consoling to see each doggy eye moist with the desire to do so! Such...