Word: australopithecus
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...sites near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Not only is the new hominid very old, dating to 4.2 million years B.P., but it is similar in some ways to A. afarensis--though clearly more primitive. Given the family resemblance, Leakey and Walker assigned the fossils to the same genus, Australopithecus, and gave the new species the name anamensis (anam is the Turkana word for lake...
...chimpanzee DNA, then averaged the rate of genetic change over time. By calculating backward, they determined that great apes and hominids branched from a common ancestor between 6 million and 4 million years ago. But no fossils were on hand to support this scenario. The oldest hominid species known, Australopithecus afarensis (southern ape of the Afar), could be dated back only 3.6 million years. Its most famous member, Lucy, unearthed in Ethiopia's bleak Afar Triangle in 1974, is a mere 3.2 million years...
Because the fossils were too distinctive to be included in Lucy's extended Australopithecus family, the researchers called the new species Ardipithecus ramidus (ardi means ground or floor in the local Afar language, and ramid means root). White and his colleagues have since found other ramidus fossils at their site but are giving out precious few details until they complete their methodical analysis of the bones. Says ramidus co-discoverer Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa: "It will be worth the wait...
Given their 2 million-year-plus life-span, the australopithecines were surely one of evolution's better experiments. But nature is an inveterate tinkerer, even with successful species. Between 3 million and 1.9 million years B.P., several variations on the Australopithecus theme popped up in eastern and southern Africa, including A. africanus, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus and A. boisei. (Just to complicate matters, the last three are assigned by some experts to an entirely different genus, Paranthropus...
...some 900 ft. away from the skull and teeth. Without physical proximity to link the two finds, and without teeth for comparison, the paleontologists can't be sure that they are from the same species. But like the skull, these fossils show a mix of primitive and advanced traits. Australopithecus afarensis, which lived between 3.6 million and 2.9 million years ago, had forearms that were long compared with its legs, while Homo erectus, which appeared about 1.7 million years ago, had shortened forearms and longer legs, more like modern humans. The new fossils fall right in the middle, both chronologically...