Word: australopithecus
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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...
...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...
According to Leakey, the Australopithecus branch and the evolutionary branch leading to man diverged several milion years ago, with the Australopithecus dying out, leaving man without phylogenetic cousins. Leakey replaces the older theory by offering another line of descent: from Ramipithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. This revision is significant because it creates the puzzle of the extinction of our Australopithecus cousins, and pushes back the time of man's origin much further than previously imagined, to perhaps 500.000 years...