Word: erectus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...number of readers were happy to find similarities between our early ancestor Homo erectus ((March 14)) and the Homo sapiens of today. Margaret Segal of Bolingbrook, Illinois, thought our cover subject might have changed his name. She notes, "He looks alarmingly like a blind date I once had." Seymour Mandel of Chicago is positive: "This is the same guy who hit me up for some spare change downtown last week." Roberta Jaeger of St. Simons Island, Georgia, comments, "He's the spitting image of a fine man who once worked as my cook in Indonesia." Roberto Llamas of Miami thinks...
...issue of how modern man, Homo sapiens, arose simultaneously in widely separated parts of the world ((SCIENCE, March 13)), it seems obvious that early Homo erectus was actually present-day Homo sapiens all along. Maybe the former wasn't very smart or attractive by today's standards, but we wouldn't be very pretty either if we spent our whole life without a bath or a haircut, lived on the ground, never wore clothes and didn't have health care...
...likely that, within Homo erectus society, people had varying degrees of hairiness and different shapes, sizes and colors, just as they do today. Very possibly, even back then, birds of a feather flocked together. Maybe that is the foundation for the racial characteristics we see today...
...research into Neanderthals, the relationship between them and modern humans is still a topic for hot debate. Some textbooks classify Neanderthals as a subspecies within Homo sapiens; others list a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. British paleontologist Christopher Stringer is convinced that Neanderthals evolved in Europe from Homo erectus and suddenly became extinct between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago, unable to compete effectively with Homo sapiens originating in Africa. "In my view," he says, "they are a dead end -- highly evolved in their own direction but not in the direction of modern humans...
...life's origins -- at first glance, such subjects seem to have little in common with urgent reports datelined Hebron or Sarajevo. But make no mistake, the news value is profound. To cite this week's cover story, which Alexander edited: the conclusion of a recent scientific paper -- that Homo erectus wandered out of Africa nearly a million years earlier than was previously believed -- requires a change in our fundamental thinking about human evolution, and hence the way we understand ourselves. When the information is that important, Alexander muses, it doesn't matter "whether Homo erectus is still making news...