Word: australopithecus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That's not to say anyone knows what it all means yet. To start with, the researchers are not quite certain how the three discoveries relate to one another. The new species, for example, which the researchers call Australopithecus garhi (garhi means surprise in the Afar language), was identified on the basis of a fragmentary skull with a complete upper jaw full of unusually large teeth that was excavated from the arid, rocky ground of Ethiopia's Middle Awash region near the village of Bouri. When the paleontologists looked closely at the skull, they were shocked. The combination of teeth...
...million-year-old Lucy skeleton I had discovered four years earlier at Hadar, Ethiopia. When I presented these findings in May 1978 at a Nobel symposium in Sweden, Mary had already agreed to be one of the coauthors on the scientific paper defining the new species, Australopithecus afarensis. A few months later, however, when the paper was being printed, she cabled me demanding removal of her name. I respected her wishes and had the title page redone. Like Louis, she did not believe Australopithecus was our ancestor; if her finds at Laetoli were our ancestors, they had to be Homo...
...Richard has strong opinions and is often hasty to make pronouncements about his discoveries. This was especially true when he presented, in 1972, a Homo skull that he believed was 2.9 million years old. Adhering to his father's belief in very early Homo, this find, older than all Australopithecus fossils then known, was a welcome and stunning endorsement of Louis' views. Louis and Richard had been feuding over museum matters, and this discovery brought them together again in a final meeting shortly before Louis died. He spent his last days comforted by the knowledge that he had been proved...
...Hadar, Ethiopia, Donald Johanson and colleagues find a 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of a new human ancestor, later called Australopithecus afarensis; it is nicknamed Lucy...
...Leakey partnership soured. When Louis died in 1972, they had been separated for three years--in part because of his philandering. Returning in 1978 to a site in Tanzania called Laetoli, Mary made what she considered the discovery of a lifetime: the unmistakable footprints of a human ancestor, possibly Australopithecus afarensis, in the region's 3.6 million-year-old volcanic ash. Not only were these hominids walking upright--rather than on all fours as apes do--but they were doing it much earlier than nearly everyone supposed and without the big brains long considered necessary for bipedalism...