Word: australopithecus
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...skull of an adult Australopithecus africanus was unearthed from a mine at Sterkfontein, in the Transvaal. From it, Robert Broom reconstructed a creature similar to the one found at Taung?an ape-man somewhat more than a meter (3 ft. 3 in.) in height, with upright posture and human-like teeth but a low forehead and a small brain. Two years later Broom uncovered a new type of the southern ape a mile away, at Kromdraai. The creature, later called Australopithecus robustus, was heavier and larger than the earlier South African finds, and had bigger teeth, set in a nutcracker...
...time, many thought the finds showed that the hulking robustus had been intelligent enough to make tools. Then in 1961 Jonathan Leakey, another of Louis' sons, unearthed parts of a 1.8 million-year-old skull that failed to fit easily into the familiar Australopithecus mold. The creature's teeth were more manlike than those of Australopithecus and the brain was larger; whereas Australopithecus brains averaged 450 to 550 cc. in volume, the cavity of the skull found by Jonathan Leakey indicated that it had contained a brain measuring nearly 700 cc. That was considerably smaller than modern man's brain?...
...skull raised a new problem. While anthropologists could accept the idea of man having evolved from Australopithecus, the evidence seemed to show that Homo habilis lived at the same time as his less advanced cousins. If so, could he have descended from them? Also, if several species of pre-men lived side by side, which one was really...
...Cleveland Museum of Natural History, found stone tools dating back 2.6 million years in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Two years later their team made an even more dramatic discovery. Not far from their first find, they uncovered the fossilized remnants of a 20-year-old female Australopithecus lying in a layer of sediment 3 million years old. Unlike most other fossils of early man ?a tooth here, a bone fragment there, occasionally a portion of a skull?this one comprised a good part of the skeleton...
Named after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lucy was a small creature, not much more than a meter tall, with a brain capacity about a third that of modern man. Lucy's skeleton gave scientists their best clues yet to the proportions of Australopithecus, and revealed her to be surprisingly short-legged. But the find left no doubts that she walked erect. The shape of her pelvis showed clearly that she was bipedal...