Word: aping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...beastly little primates were much more than that. They were probably the smartest, most advanced creatures of their day. Aegyptopithecus zeuxis (connecting ape of Egypt), which lived some 30 million years ago in what was then a lushly forested region in Egypt, has long been suspected of occupying a key position in the genealogy of higher primates, including man. Three years ago, Simons and his colleagues resumed their digging about 60 km (40 miles) southwest of Cairo, where he had found a single fossilized Aegyptopithecus skull in 1966. Last week they reported striking new evidence that the scrawny creature...
...From the latest group of fossils, he is convinced that it was the immediate forebear of Dryopithecus, a more advanced primate that first appeared in Africa 8 million years later; that was not long before the crucial split in the evolutionary tree that produced one branch leading to the apes, another to man. Simons is so sure of Aegyptopithecus' place in the evolutionary scheme that he has taken to calling the beast "the dawn ape...
...Many of the plays (Thunder Rock, Shadow of Heroes) and movie scripts (Madame Bovary, Khartoum) that the Chicago-born Ardrey wrote, beginning in the 1930s, showed the fascination with man's roots that later led him into anthropology. It was his notion that man is a "risen ape" whose drive to acquire power, defend territory and make war is inherited, rather than a learned response. This idea, like others Ardrey embraced, stirred wide controversy among scholars and laymen-which, in a way, was his purpose...