Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Turkana site yielded a Homo erectus skull resembling that of Peking man and with a brain size of 900 cc. The age of the fossil, about 1.5 million years, showed that Homo erectus had emerged even earlier and was hunting in the African plains while Australopithecus still roamed the earth. Because the more advanced Homo erectus was almost certainly a direct ancestor of modern man, the new skull, in the view of some anthropologists, effectively eliminated Australopithecus from man's ancestry...
...cause of the changes can be traced, at least in part, to plate tectonics, the movement of the great crustal plates that ride on the earth's semimolten mantle and provide its solid outer shell. Some 45 million to 50 million years ago, the plate that carries the Indian subcontinent was pushing up into the underbelly of Asia, slowly thrusting up the massive mountain range now called the Himalayas. This new barrier to global wind circulation helped change weather patterns, altering average temperatures around the world. By about 14 million years ago, climates that had been tropical had turned largely...
...against relatives of former petty landowners. In one telling vignette, Munro writes of a man who insists that local postal clerks read his letters to an overseas relative, lest he be accused later of being counterrevolutionary. China, observes Munro, "in many ways is the most tightly controlled nation on earth...
...nerves, quickly established its creator as the reigning boy genius of American cinema and went on to pile up the largest box office take in the history of movies. Now 29, Spielberg is ready with his encore, an $18 million extravaganza about UFOs and aliens who come to earth in them called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If the director is nervous, it is hard to blame him: when the new film premieres in New York and Los Angeles, Spielberg will be judged by the standards he himself set with Jaws...
...late one night, shooting halted abruptly so that everyone could observe what Spielberg believed to be a UFO cruising the sky. "Everyone was lying there on their backs with binoculars," says Dillon. "I remember thinking that if there were extraterrestrial beings up there observing us, they would think that earth creatures were flat beings with strange eyes." The object turned out to be an Echo satellite...