Word: asfaw
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ramidus (ardi means ground or floor in the local Afar language, and ramid means root). White and his colleagues have since found other ramidus fossils at their site but are giving out precious few details until they complete their methodical analysis of the bones. Says ramidus co-discoverer Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa: "It will be worth the wait...
Then, four months ago, Asfaw and White's team made another dramatic announcement. A fragmentary skull found near Bouri, an Ethiopian village in the Middle Awash region northeast of Addis Ababa, could well be from the missing australopithecine that sired the human race (see cover photo). Excavated in 1997, its jutting face and upper jaw filled with large teeth clearly belong to a species more advanced than A. afarensis yet more primitive than the earliest humans...
Earlier discoveries at Gona, an Ethiopian site about 60 miles north of Bouri, had already shown that someone was using carefully manufactured stone tools in the area at about that time. Now Asfaw and White's team could make a circumstantial case that their species, A. garhi, was the gifted toolmaker. If so, this was a crucial bit of scientific sleuthing. In the 2 million years since the first human ancestor began to walk upright, nothing much had changed. Now something had. Rather than just using sticks and stones to leverage innate abilities--something done by plenty of animals, from...
Whoever did it, the creation of technology gave its inventors an astonishing advantage over other hominid species. Stone hammers and blades let them exploit carcasses left behind by other predators and permitted them to shift to an energy-rich, high-fat diet. "That," asserts Asfaw, "leads to all kinds of evolutionary consequences...
...fossils in hand date only to 200,000 B.P., and the oldest Homo sapiens to about 100,000. But some recent discoveries may help answer those questions. A 1 million-year-old cranium from Buia, Eritrea, for example, has characteristics of both H. erectus and H. sapiens. And what Asfaw and his colleagues call a "spectacular" partial cranium of the same age from Ethiopia should help as well when it's formally unveiled...