Word: aping
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...startlingly different skull embedded in a piece of limestone from a quarry at Taung?Tswana for "place of the lion"?about 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Kimberley. Dart determined that the skull had come from a five-year-old primate (the order of mammals that includes humans, apes and monkeys) who had lived on the threshold of humanity. Still, he recognized that the creature was even more primitive than Java man. He named it Australopithecus africanus, or the southern ape of Africa. The skull displayed an odd blend of ape and human characteristics. Dart's creature clearly...
...most significant, the creature had walked upright. Its foramen magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord enters the skull, was not in the rear of the skull as it is in an ape or any other animal that walks on all fours; as with Neanderthal. Peking and Java men, it was far enough forward in the skull to indicate that the spinal column was usually in a vertical position and that the young primate had been bipedal...
...skull of an adult Australopithecus africanus was unearthed from a mine at Sterkfontein, in the Transvaal. From it, Robert Broom reconstructed a creature similar to the one found at Taung?an ape-man somewhat more than a meter (3 ft. 3 in.) in height, with upright posture and human-like teeth but a low forehead and a small brain. Two years later Broom uncovered a new type of the southern ape a mile away, at Kromdraai. The creature, later called Australopithecus robustus, was heavier and larger than the earlier South African finds, and had bigger teeth, set in a nutcracker...
Anthropologists now believe that man's family tree (see chart) goes back to a primate called Dryopithecus, a true ape that appeared some 20 million years ago. Much later?by 14 million years ago?the Dryopithecus line had split into three branches...
...branch evolved into the ancestors of today's great apes?the gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, which are man's closest living cousins. Another produced a creature called Gigantopithecus, a huge ground ape that roamed the valleys of Asia for a few million years before it became extinct. A third branch gave rise to Ramapithecus, which most anthropologists believe was a distant ancestor...