Word: clan
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...drawn fire for its historical inaccuracies -- and, indeed, events spanning nearly three years have been telescoped into a few weeks, while the role of investigator Richard Goodwin has been vastly exaggerated. But the real problem is the easy Hollywood cliches into which history has been transformed. The Van Doren clan is a caricature of effete Waspishness, Goodwin a garden-variety TV-movie crusader. Herb Stempel, who blew the whistle on the scandal, is reborn as perhaps the most offensively stereotyped Jew in modern American cinema. To gauge the injustice, one has to go back to the actual tapes...
That's exactly the case with the new species, which now bears the scientific name Australopithecus ramidus (ramid means root in the local Afar language). Like Lucy and her clan, known as Australopithecus afarensis, ramidus had teeth with some apelike and some human characteristics. But at least one specimen -- a baby molar still attached to a piece of an immature ramidus jaw -- resembles a chimpanzee tooth more than a molar from any known hominid. "It's obvious that it belongs to an ancestor of afarensis," says Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the Nature...
...those they found were in fragments; chew marks on the bones show that the hominids' carcasses were ravaged by carnivores. That makes it hard for anyone to be sure what these creatures looked like and how they walked. The fossils suggest that at least some members of the ramidus clan were about 4 ft. tall, but that doesn't establish what the range in height was. In some African apes, males are considerably bigger than females, as they were in Lucy's species as well. Says White: "We do know the arm bones come from an individual that was larger...
...Xiongnu empire finally collapsed during the 1st century A.D., primarily because of disputes over succession rights. Some 800 years later, another clan, the Qidan, conquered much of northeast China and amassed a formidable empire stretching from central Asia to the Sea of Japan. During the Liao dynasty they founded, the Qidan built several hundred cities...
...time Temujen, the future Genghis Khan, was born in the 1160s, the Jin were in decline, and the tribes of the steppe were once again at war with one another. When Temujen was nine, his father, a clan leader, was poisoned by Tatars; the clan then abandoned the rest of the family. Isolated and impoverished, mother and children were forced to eat rats and insects to survive. Temujen eventually reclaimed his hereditary right to be clan leader, and by means of powerful alliances, marriage and a series of battles, he began to annex rival tribes. In 1206 tribal leaders declared...