Word: australopithecus
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...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...
...result of these findings is a radical revision of long-held views of evolution. As recently as a decade ago, scientists talked about a direct, unbranching line of descent ?Australopithecus, Homo erectus, modern man?one following the other in logical order. Now all that has changed. "We can no longer talk of a great chain of being in the 19th century sense, from which there is a missing link," says Phillip Tobias, 51, Dart's successor as professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand medical school in Johannesburg. "We should think rather of multiple strands forming...
Though scientists have found practically no telltale fossils from the crucial period between 8 million and 5 million years ago, anthropologists speculate that some time toward the end of this period the hominid line split into the species Australopithecus robustus and africanus. There was also a third species, which some anthropologists believe branched off at the same time, and others think evolved later from A. africanus. Whatever the case, it is generally agreed that the third species was not an Australopithecus, but the first creature that could rightfully be called Homo?...
...evidence shows the split that produced the first human must have occurred longer ago than 3.5 million years?the age of the oldest known Homo fossils, which were found in 1975 by Mary Leakey. Again, the rigorous demands of savanna living may have been responsible for the branching out. Australopithecus africanus, straining to augment its food supply in the flat grasslands, began to eat meat?probably obtaining it not by hunting, but by scavenging the kills left behind by large predators. Australopithecus robustus, on the other hand, continued to subsist largely on seeds and nuts. Both eventually died out, unable...
While his Australopithecus cousins foraged or scavenged, Homo habilis began to make tools and to hunt. Both actions accelerated his evolution. Toolmaking, which required reasoning and more complex neurological hookups, gave a survival advantage to the creatures with the biggest brains. That led to an increase in brain size. Hunting, with its emphasis on outwitting animals that were either faster, stronger or fiercer than the hominids that hunted them, also stimulated rapid brain growth. In addition, says Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, it placed a premium on cooperation, strengthening the bond between members of the group and starting...