Word: australopithecus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Patterson led the 1971 expedition to Kenya that unearthed the jawbore of a five-million-year-old ancestor of modern man, Australopithecus. At that time, it was the oldest known Australopithecus specimen...
...time the spoors were made, Africa was also inhabited by another upright hominid called Australopithecus, or ape of the south. This manlike creature is generally regarded to have been an evolutionary dead end, and not a human forerunner. Remains of both Australopithecus and Homo erectus have been found around Lake Turkana. But researchers believe the footprints more closely resemble those of Homo erectus; they are larger and more widely spaced (which indicates a longer stride) than those associated with Australopithecus, if they are Homo prints, they are the first ever found of an immediate ancestor of modern...
...much more than a meter tall (just under 4 ft.), suffered from arthritis and had a head like an ape. But last week she became a front-page celebrity. Anthropologist Donald Carl Johanson of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History called a press conference to claim that Lucy* is Australopithecus afarensis, a new species in man's evolutionary lineage. He put her age at 3.5 million years, which makes her younger than man's earliest known ancestor, Ramapithecus, who lived 10 million to 14 million years ago. But Johanson said Lucy came before the hominids split into...
...been bipedal: the clue was a telltale knee joint. In addition, Lucy's tiny skull suggested a brain too small to place her among previously discovered toolmaking hominids. At first, Johanson and his partner, Timothy White of the University of California at Berkeley, tentatively classified her as Australopithecus africanus, a species discovered in 1924 by South African Anthropologist Raymond Dart. The team changed its view after locating the bones of 13 creatures roughly similar to Lucy in the Afar region, and comparing them with other hominid fossils found in 1975 by the well-known anthropologist Mary Leakey, in Laetolil...
Johanson's announcement, however, left most colleagues puzzled. The bones have been around for more than four years now, long since dated by potassium-argon tests, and many anthropologists who have studied them are generally convinced that Lucy is an Australopithecus africanus, not some new species...