Word: ars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...additional bone fragments were found during an intensive search-and-reconstruction effort that would go on for the next 15 years and culminate in a key piece of evolutionary evidence revealed this week: the 4.4 million-year-old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as Ardipithecus ramidus (abbreviated Ar. ramidus). (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
Scientists know this because they've studied not only Ardi's fossils but also 110 other remnants they uncovered, which belonged to at least 35 Ar. ramidus individuals. Combine those bones with the thousands of plant and animal fossils from the site and they get a remarkably clear picture of the habitat Ardi roamed some 200,000 generations ago. It was a grassy woodland with patches of denser forest and freshwater springs. Colobus monkeys chattered in the trees, while baboons, elephants, spiral-horned antelopes and hyenas roamed the terrain. Shrews, hares, porcupines and small carnivores scuttled in the underbrush. There...
...knows what that reason was, but a theory about Ardi's social behavior may hold a clue. Lovejoy thinks Ar. ramidus had a social system found in no other primates except humans. Among gorillas and chimps, males viciously fight other males for the attention of females. But among Ardipithecus, says Lovejoy, males may have abandoned such competition, opting instead to pair-bond with females and stay together in order to rear their offspring (though not necessarily monogamously or for life). The evidence of this harmonious existence comes from, of all things, Ardipithecus' teeth: its canine teeth are relatively stubby compared...
That suggests that females mated preferentially with smaller-fanged males. In order for females to have had so much power, Lovejoy argues, Ar. ramidus must have developed a social system in which males were cooperative. Males probably helped females, and their own offspring, by foraging for and sharing food, for example - a change in behavior that could help explain why bipedality arose. Carrying food is difficult in the woods, after all, if you can't free up your forelimbs by walking erect. (Read "Ida: Humankind's Earliest Ancestor! [Not Really...
...business community there is clear support for a closer relationship. Claude Bébéar, who heads the Institut Montaigne, is a former CEO of insurance giant Axa and a formidable corporate power broker. At a recent panel discussion in Paris, Léo Apotheker, the CEO of German software firm SAP, endorsed many of the institute's ideas and lamented that the recent financial crisis "showed the nonexistence of Europe." He also advocated merging the French employers' association Medef with its German counterpart, the Federation of German Industries...