Word: casement
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...skull of the ape, named Aegyptopithecus zeuxis (for "linking Egyptian ape"), was found protruding from rock during a 1966 Yale expedition to the Fayum desert. But it was not until the specimen had been returned to Yale and extracted from its rock casement that Simons realized that it was an un usually complete skull of a primate, lacking only portions of its top and bottom and four incisor teeth. "Not only is the skull some eight to ten million years older than any other fossils related to man," Simons said, "but it is better preserved than any that are older...
Born into a Protestant Irish family in Ulster, which had given generations of its sons as army officers and civil servants to the crown. Casement was raised in County Antrim and eventually joined the foreign service. A handsome bachelor, he spent nearly a third of his life in Africa, and while serving as a British consul in the Belgian Congo exposed the brutalities imposed on the natives by the administrators of Belgium's King Leopold...
...Later Casement investigated conditions on the rubber plantations of the Putumayo Valley in Peru and found horrors of mutilation and murder even more shocking than those of the Congo. He was a man of passionate idealism and undoubted courage. Joseph Conrad thought him "a limpid personality" with "a touch of the conquistador in him." After Casement resigned from the consular service in 1913, he was caught up in Ireland's seething demand for home rule, denouncing Britain as the "bitch and harlot of the North...
Black Diaries. At his trial, Casement seemed to one observer "by far the noblest man in court, and the happiest." George Bernard Shaw supplied a plan for the defense; but it was refused by Casement, who made a ringing speech from the dock that compares favorably with the classic delivered by Robert Emmet in similar circumstances...
...When Casement was found guilty, a clamor rose from Ireland, the U.S. and even Britain that he be reprieved. But the prosecution had a weapon of great power: the "black diaries" said to have been found in a trunk Casement left behind in his old London lodgings...