Word: australopithecus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proportions of the skeleton were also a surprise to the scientists. The upper arm bone is about 95% as long as the thigh bone, indicating that the arms dangled to the knees, much as they do in apes. Thus Homo habilis closely resembled Australopithecus afarensis, of which the best-known example is the famed "Lucy" skeleton, which was discovered by Johanson in 1974. Lucy's ratio is 85%; in modern humans, the figure is about...
...that's a big monkey, thought Paleontologist Alan Walker as he plucked the skull fragment from a gully west of Kenya's Lake Turkana. But that was no monkey. The bone belonged to a 2.5 million-year-old ape-man called Australopithecus boisei. The discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue...
...manlike creatures to walk upright, 3.5 million or more years ago, and that their evolution ran parallel to that of humanity's direct ancestors. The dispute arises over details. Some researchers, including Anthropologist Donald Johanson, director of the Berkeley-based Institute of Human Origins, think that a single species, Australopithecus afarensis, which includes the celebrated 3 million-year-old skeleton called Lucy, was the common ancestor of all later australopithecines, as well as man. The two branches, they say, split about 3 million years ago, with the Australopithecus line dying out 1 million years ago. Leakey, on the other hand...
...night of the find.) White, in any case, has every reason to be cautious. In 1979 he and the leader of the Lucy expedition, Anthropologist Donald Johanson, touched off a major anthropological controversy by lumping Lucy and other East African fossils into a single new species, which they called Australopithecus afarensis (apeman from Afar). These Lucy-type creatures, they said, were common ancestors of two distinct hominid lines-the australopithecines, which presumably died out, and the strain that 'led eventually to Homo sapiens...
According to the authors, Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) is important not merely because of her age but because of her posture. Until now, it was believed that humanity's ancestors developed large brains before they walked erect. Lucy shows that it was the other way around...