Word: australopithecus
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...theories-that their hobbits evolved directly from Homo erectus, which was thought to have died out a half-million or so years ago-which the critics lambasted, is now looking less likely. But their new idea is even more audacious: the hobbits, they suggest, may come directly from the Australopithecus family, which went extinct something like 2 million years ago. Their detailed argument for this notion has yet to be published, and critics are still very cautious even about embracing the idea that the hobbits represent a new species at all. But while he agrees that more evidence is needed...
...whenever anyone discovers a new hominid, a lot of people come along and say it's an ape or a diseased human." Gee, who says the critics haven't shaken his belief that a new species has been found, cites the example of another hotly debated discovery, that of Australopithecus africanus in 1924, the so-called "missing link" between apes and human ancestors. "Nature published that paper too and all the great and good in the scientific establishment refused to believe it." It took 25 years, but eventually the discovery was accepted, Gee says, noting that it will...
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 of 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 ... As recently as a decade ago, scientists talked about a direct, unbranching line of descent ... Now all that has changed ... While his Australopithecus cousins foraged or scavenged, Homo habilis began to make tools...
...largely on whom you ask. A number of distinguished paleontologists, including Bernard Wood, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum, perceive the face to be jarringly modern--more modern even than Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, which is between 3.6 million and 2.9 million years old--and thus quite different from what they expected to see in such an ancient hominid...
...savannas of eastern Africa--where our family tree first took root--were the habitat of rival species, most of which were evolutionary dead ends. But what about before that? Paleontologists have generally agreed that there was just one hominid line, beginning with a small, upright-walking species known as Australopithecus afarensis, most famously represented by "Lucy," a remarkably complete (about 40%) skeleton found in Ethiopia...