Word: australopithecus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time, many thought the finds showed that the hulking robustus had been intelligent enough to make tools. Then in 1961 Jonathan Leakey, another of Louis' sons, unearthed parts of a 1.8 million-year-old skull that failed to fit easily into the familiar Australopithecus mold. The creature's teeth were more manlike than those of Australopithecus and the brain was larger; whereas Australopithecus brains averaged 450 to 550 cc. in volume, the cavity of the skull found by Jonathan Leakey indicated that it had contained a brain measuring nearly 700 cc. That was considerably smaller than modern man's brain?...
...skull raised a new problem. While anthropologists could accept the idea of man having evolved from Australopithecus, the evidence seemed to show that Homo habilis lived at the same time as his less advanced cousins. If so, could he have descended from them? Also, if several species of pre-men lived side by side, which one was really...
...Cleveland Museum of Natural History, found stone tools dating back 2.6 million years in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Two years later their team made an even more dramatic discovery. Not far from their first find, they uncovered the fossilized remnants of a 20-year-old female Australopithecus lying in a layer of sediment 3 million years old. Unlike most other fossils of early man ?a tooth here, a bone fragment there, occasionally a portion of a skull?this one comprised a good part of the skeleton...
Named after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lucy was a small creature, not much more than a meter tall, with a brain capacity about a third that of modern man. Lucy's skeleton gave scientists their best clues yet to the proportions of Australopithecus, and revealed her to be surprisingly short-legged. But the find left no doubts that she walked erect. The shape of her pelvis showed clearly that she was bipedal...
...skull and a similar find, labeled 1590, proved that Homo habilis?from whom man could have descended?coexisted with Australopithecus, thus weakening arguments that the latter was man's direct ancestor. Then, in 1975, the Turkana site yielded a Homo erectus skull resembling that of Peking man and with a brain size of 900 cc. The age of the fossil, about 1.5 million years, showed that Homo erectus had emerged even earlier and was hunting in the African plains while Australopithecus still roamed the earth. Because the more advanced Homo erectus was almost certainly a direct ancestor of modern...