Word: erectus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Paleontologists don't pretend to know everything about how Homo erectus lived, but it's a safe bet the ancient prehumans passed their days in unremarkable ways. Their language was probably little more than a system of gestures and grunts. Their diet, consisting of foraged fruits and crudely cooked animals, was not an easy one to force down--if the attachment points on their skulls for stout chewing muscles and their large front teeth suggest anything. Their skill in making tools was limited: a flaked stone or a crude ax was probably as good as it got. They arose...
...seemed. According to research published last week in the journal Science, Homo erectus may not have gone so quietly into that good night. On the Indonesian island of Java, it now appears, a small group of hangers-on may have lived as recently as 27,000 years ago, thriving in a world that Homo sapiens had long before claimed...
...primitive tools found in a cave in central China support the theory that the ancestors of modern humans began migrating out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier than once thought. Scientists believe the remains may belong to a species called Homo habilis, a precursor of Homo erectus...
Meanwhile, Louis's scientific and activist legacy is carried on by son Richard and daughter-in-law Meave. Among Rich ard's major finds are further evidence of Homo habilis and, with Alan Walker in 1984, "Turkana Boy," a 1.6 million-year-old skeleton of a strapping, adolescent Homo erectus. As director of the Kenya Wildlife Service from 1989 to 1994, Richard revitalized the country's national parks and deterred poachers, but he made political enemies in the process. As combative and tough as his father, he has survived a kidney transplant and the loss of both legs below...
...members of the species Australopithecus afarensis were the oldest known members of the human family. No more: at 4.4 million years of age, the newly unearthed Australopithecus ramidus is the closest link yet (no longer missing) to the common ancestor of apes and humans. A second major find: Homo erectus, the first of Lucy's descendants to leave Africa, made that move about 800,000 years earlier than had been thought. Anyone want an obsolete paleontology book, cheap...