Word: chadli
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Amid all the upheaval, one thing seems certain: the airlines will probably leave passengers more confused and frustrated than they are today. "You get what you pay for. Southwest isn't a business airline. American is. But they're in danger of losing that distinction," says Chad Robertson, 25, a district manager for DaimlerChrysler who commutes once a week on American between Dallas and Texas outposts like Amarillo, Lubbock and Odessa. "The airlines may be hurting...
Finding Toumai Man, the oldest hominid, in Chad [PALEONTOLOGY, July 22] fits in well with the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed by paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould. [The theory explains why new species, rather than evolving gradually over millions of years, seem to suddenly appear in the fossil record, punctuating long periods of species stability, or equilibrium.] The Toumai fossil could have been a member of a peripherally isolated community that evolved into our oldest ancestors. You reported that several modern-looking hominids coexisted, and this also jibes with the introduction of members of an isolated community into...
Although the Chad fossil find is indeed important, as a paleontologist I can assure you I am not scrambling to digest its implications. The traits that Toumai exhibits are what may be expected in a 7 million-year-old ape inhabiting woodlands whose origin predates the human-African ape divergence. The fossil record is far too complete for any one single ape fossil to jar the expectations of any serious paleontologist. ESTEBAN E. SARMIENTO Department of Vertebrate Biology American Museum of Natural History New York City...
...that of chimps, our closest living relatives. Even more surprising, this ancient hominid was not discovered anywhere near the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, where all the record setters of the past three decades have been found. Instead, it turned up in the sub-Saharan Sahel region of Chad, more than 1,500 miles to the west, forcing a rethinking of the conventional wisdom about where humans arose...
...notion that our ancestors first emerged on a treeless savanna. It now looks as though this pivotal event happened in a setting that was at least partly wooded. Most remarkable of all, though, is the skull itself. The creature, known formally as Sahelanthropus tchadensis (roughly translated "Sahel hominid from Chad") and informally as Toumai ("hope of life," in the local Goran language), has a mix of apelike and hominid features. And to some paleontologists, the hominid features, especially the face, are a lot more modern-looking than anyone would have expected at so early an evolutionary stage. "A hominid...