Word: australopithecus
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...Kimberley. Dart determined that the skull had come from a five-year-old primate (the order of mammals that includes humans, apes and monkeys) who had lived on the threshold of humanity. Still, he recognized that the creature was even more primitive than Java man. He named it Australopithecus africanus, or the southern ape of Africa. The skull displayed an odd blend of ape and human characteristics. Dart's creature clearly had a large, apelike face, but its teeth were proportioned like those of a modern man. Its brain, although far smaller than that of a human child, had nonetheless...
...from Laetolil. Returning there after her husband's death in 1972, on a hunch "we didn't look hard enough," she began uncovering jawbones and teeth that seemed clearly human; that is, they belonged to the genus Homo (or true man), rather than to man-apes (like Australopithecus, who once was thought to be the forerunner of man but is now regarded as a possible evolutionary dead end). One clue was the teeth, which showed that the creatures were meat eaters. By the time she finished her collecting last summer, she had discovered bones from no fewer than...
Leakey rejects that notion, but he does side with Johanson on another conclusion. It has long been thought that man's direct ancestor prior to Homo erectus was a small, possibly toolmaking man-ape called Australopithecus, who lived in Africa as recently as 1.5 million years ago. If Johanson's jawbone belonged to a true Homo, the australopiths may well have had overwhelming competition from even smarter creatures who evolved into modern...
...sensation of this particular discovery," Howells continued, "is that it goes back as far as five million years. Ten years ago, scientists thought the Australopithecus, a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, was only a half a million years old. Then several fossils were discovered which proved he lived long before that. But this is the oldest bone discovered...
...Kenya and the Sudan meet. There, a University of Chicago expedition has found 40 prehistoric teeth and two jawbones buried in volcanic ash that is perhaps 4,000,000 years old. The expedition's leader, Anthropologist F. Clark Howell, is convinced that the creatures are members of the Australopithecus family, even though they must have belonged to a branch that probably did not eat meat or make tools. Despite their proximity to various ferocious neighbors in the fossil bed, says Howell, these man-apes were apparently able to survive with no other weaponry than their wits...