Word: erectus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Until now, most anthropologists have believed that Homo habilis, a species that lived in eastern and southern Africa between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago, stood about the same height and had the same body build as Homo erectus, its successor. Homo habilis (literally, handy man) was the first human ancestor to make stone tools. The new Olduvai Gorge skeleton, however, suggests that Homo habilis was much smaller and more apelike than previously thought. If that is the case, says Johanson, the modern body type probably did not evolve until Homo erectus emerged some 1.6 million years ago. Moreover...
...Observes Johanson: "The new specimen suggests that the body pattern we call modern did not appear until Homo erectus and that it happened fairly rapidly." Says White, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley: "The question is, Why did they lose those features, and what made them change in just 200,000 years...
...press conferences in Washington and Nairobi, Leakey and Walker last week announced that they had unearthed the remains of a male specimen of Homo erectus. The hominid, given a catalog number of WT 15000, was one of a group that was directly ancestral to man and is known to have used fire and lived in caves as well as on the plains of Africa. Members of the species migrated as far as Asia, where the cranium of the so-called Java Man was discovered in 1891 and the Peking...
...belonged to the same individual. The only missing pieces of the skeletal puzzle are the hominid's left arm and hand, the right arm from the elbow down, and most of both feet. Leakey hopes to unearth those fragments next summer. The only other known near complete Homo erectus was discovered in 1975 by Leakey across Lake Turkana from the present dig. But that hominid had suffered from a degenerative bone disease, and therefore the find was useless as an archetype of the species...
...youth, about age twelve. But the length of his thigh bones and the size of his vertebrae indicate that he stood about 5 ft. 4 in. tall and may have weighed as much as 150 lbs. This was the size hitherto postulated by scientists for a full-grown Homo erectus...