Word: australopithecus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...anthropologists at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science listened with shock and bewilderment to the description of the anthropoid ape fossil which Dr. Robert Broom of the Transvaal Museum discovered in the South African Sterkfontein caves last fall. The ape, of the family Australopithecus transvaalensis, lived in the Pleistocene days, when Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus were already beating down lesser men. Since South Africa was treeless, Australopithecus must have walked on the ground. Whether it walked human-fashion is not known, since the bones of the lower leg have not been found, but certain...
...year 1936 has been a boom year in fossil anthropology. A quarry blast in South Africa turned up an adult skull of the same genus as the immature fossil Australopithecus found in 1924. A brain case discovered in England appeared to be older than Piltdown Man. A cranial piece dug out of a California creek, though probably not much more than 30,000 years old, looked like the oldest human relic ever found in the U. S. (TIME, Oct. 12 et seq.). Few weeks ago from the cave at Chou-Kou-Tien, whence the famed pair of skulls belonging...
Much of the uncertainty over the status of Australopithecus was due to his extreme youth. He was not more than six years old when he died. The jaw contained 20 milk teeth, four permanent teeth. Dr. Dart placed him at the base of the human evolutionary stem. But Sir Arthur Keith, while admitting certain manlike features, put him on the same branch with gorillas and chimpanzees, though on a separate twig. After several years the lower jaw was detached from the upper, and the crowns of the milk teeth were seen to be almost wholly human in form. Dr. William...
...Broom's joy the Sterkfontein skull was that of an adult, with fairly heavy brow ridges and a brain capacity of about 600 cc. He found some resemblances to the Taungs skull and some differences, therefore put his fossil in the same genus with Australopithecus but in a different species. Name: Australopithecus transvaalensis Broom. One molar which he was able to examine closely showed close affinities to Dryopithecus, a well-known genus of extinct apes. It is from a generalized type of Dryopithecus that most anthropologists believe man evolved...
...time he wrote, Professor Broom had made no attempt to free the fossil from its rocky matrix, as the bones were brittle to the point of crumbling. When they are finally freed, complete scientific scrutiny may establish the right of Australopithecus to a place in man's evolutionary prolog. Meanwhile, says Dr. Broom, the discovery shows that "we had in South Africa in Pleistocene times large non-forest living anthropoids-not very closely allied to either the chimpanzee or the gorilla but showing a number of typical human characteristics not met with in any of the living anthropoids...