Word: boned
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...despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn't fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate...
...cousins thrived and passed their genes on to the next evolutionary generation. Between 3 million and 2 million years B.P., a healthy handful of descendants sprang from the A. afarensis line, upright primates that were similar to Lucy in overall body design but different in the details of bone structure. Australopithecus africanus, Paranthropus robustus, Paranthropus boisei -- all flourished in Africa. But in the evolutionary elimination tournament, the two Paranthropus species eventually lost out. Only A. africanus, most scientists believe, survived to give rise to the next character in the human drama...
Earlier protohumans had used tools too -- bits of horn or bone for digging, sticks for fishing termites out of their mounds (something modern chimps still do). But H. habilis deliberately hammered on rocks to crack and flake them into useful shapes. The tools were probably not used for hunting, as anthropologists once thought; H. habilis, on average, was less than 5 ft. tall and weighed under 100 lbs., and it could hardly have competed with the lions and leopards that stalked the African landscape. The hominids were almost certainly scavengers instead, supplementing a mostly vegetarian diet with meat left over...
While Dubois didn't find anything like Lucy, he discovered some intriguingly primitive fossils, a skullcap and a leg bone, in eroded sediments along the Solo River in Java. They looked partly human, partly simian, and Dubois decided that they belonged to an ancient race of ape-men. He called his creature Anthropopithecus erectus; its popular name was Java man. Over the next several decades, comparable bones were found in China (Peking man) and finally, starting in the 1950s, in Africa...
...sort of bizarre," said Amanda W. Gates '94 of Harvard Student Agencies. "It seems as though the administration is trying to crack down on publicity... I have a bone of contention with that...