Word: australopithecus
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...discoveries. What results is, in fact, a reinterpretation that alters the earlier hypothetical outline of man's evolution conceived before African discoveries at Koobi Fora and other sites. The basic hypothesis which Leakey then transforms claims that man's evolution involved a gradual transformation from simian, to Ramipithecus, to Australopithecus, and then finally, perhaps only 50,000 years ago, to modern man. However, Leakey contends in The People of the Lake that Australopithecus was a cousin of man, but not an ancestor...
...uncovered near crocodile-infested Lake Turkana. The authors admit that we know little about Ramapithecus, a small apelike fellow who existed some 12 million years ago; all we have are a few teeth and bones. Nor, despite the recently unearthed ribs and vertebrae, is there much more data about Australopithecus, who survived until about a million years ago, then turned down an evolutionary dead-end street and disappeared. But science has learned what happened to habilis. With a brain-half again as big as his neighbors', he not only adapted to his environment but evolved. Habilis passed his genes...
What if Leakey, or anyone else, should discover an intact Australopithecus africanus with only 23 ribs...
...Then, in 1963, on a chance flight over Lake Natron in northern Tanzania, he spotted what looked like interesting sediment beds and, encouraged by his parents, set off to explore the area. His first expedition proved to be a success; the team he assembled found a fragment from an Australopithecus robustus. He decided to become an anthropologist...
...need broad molars to chew their fibrous foods. Fossilized bones can indicate a creature's size and weight, just as the length of a thigh bone of a modern human can be used to accurately estimate his height. But often anthropologists must interpolate. Anatomists studying jawless skulls of Australopithecus robustus could not help noticing the creature's well-developed zygomatic arch, the structure to which the jaw muscles are anchored; they deduced that the man-ape had an enormous jaw. The discovery of large A. robustus jawbones proved that they were right...