Word: australopithecus
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Scientists now generally agree that the first man-like animals emerged in Africa about a million years ago. The man-apes were short, erect creatures combining features of both men and apes. They were terrestrial, carnivorous animals, and they have been named Australopithecus africanus. The first of their fossils was discovered...
...Australopithecus, like all higher primates, is unspecialized. He is physiologically equipped with no defenses; even the sharp canine teeth of his ape ancestors, Proconsul, are gone. His brain is only slightly larger than that of an ape. The most natural question to ask is, how could such a generalized defenseless creature exist...
...playwright who went to Africa in 1955 to concoct magazine articles and lick his wounds after a Broadway flop (his Shadow of Heroes, a play about the Hungarian Rebellion, opened to mixed reviews last week). He was fascinated by South African Anthropologist Raymond A. Dart, discoverer of Australopithecus, a man-ape who lived about 750,000 years ago. Ardrey was deeply impressed by Dart's contention that the small-brained Australopithecus used antelope bones as clubs and that these weapons changed him from a vegetarian into a successful predator and allowed him to develop into true, big-brained...
...science, most of this stuff is highly questionable. Australopithecus was a great discovery, but the evidence that he used weapons is extremely flimsy, and there is even less proof that it was the weapon that led to his development into true man. In any case, weapons are only part of the bag of tricks that raised primitive man above his apelike relatives. Equally important were nonviolent, food-getting tools such as game traps, digging sticks and mills for grinding hard seeds. Fire was vital. So was speech, which enabled men to cooperate closely, form permanent cultures and exchange useful information...
...decade the mammoth limestone caves of the Makapansgat Valley in South Africa (TIME, June 20, 1955) have been yielding the bones and implements of a remarkably human creature known to anthropologists as Australopithecus prometheus (African...