Word: erectus
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Confidence is much stronger in the ages put on the Indonesian Homo erectus fossils. The leaders of the team that did the analysis, Carl Swisher and Garniss Curtis of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, are acknowledged masters of the art of geochronology, the dating of things from the past. Says Alan Walker of Johns Hopkins University, an expert on early humans: "The IHO is doing world-class stuff." There is always the chance that the bones Swisher and Curtis studied were shifted out of their original position by geologic forces or erosion, ending up in sediments much older...
...Indonesian researchers said they had redated fossil skull fragments found at two sites on the island of Java. Instead of being a million years old, as earlier analysis suggested, the fossils appear to date back nearly 2 million years. They are from the species known as Homo erectus -- the first primate to look anything like modern humans and the first to use fire and create sophisticated stone tools. Says F. Clark Howell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley: "This is just overwhelming. No one expected such...
...evidence from Java holds up, it means that protohumans left their African homeland hundreds of thousands of years earlier than anyone had believed, long before the invention of the advanced stone tools that, according to current textbooks, made the exodus possible. It would also mean that Homo erectus had plenty of time to evolve into two different species, one African and one Asian. Most researchers are convinced that the African branch of the family evolved into modern humans. But what about the Asian branch? Did it die out? Or did it also give rise to Homo sapiens...
...prehistoric African life enabled members of the H. habilis clan to survive as a species for 500,000 years or more, and at least one group of them apparently evolved, around 2 million years B.P., into a taller, stronger, smarter variety of human. From the neck down, Homo erectus, on average about 5 ft. 6 in. tall, was probably almost indistinguishable from a modern human. Above the neck -- well, these were still primitive humans. The skulls have flattened foreheads and prominent brow ridges like those of a gorilla or chimpanzee, and the jawbone shows no hint of anything resembling...
...erectus was an extraordinarily successful and mobile group, so well traveled, in fact, that fossils from the species were first found thousands of miles away from its original home in Africa. In the 1890s, Eugene Dubois, an adventurous Dutch physician, joined his country's army as an excuse to get to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Dubois agreed with Charles Darwin's idea that early humans and great apes were closely related. Since the East Indies had orangutans, Dubois thought, they might have fossils of the "missing link...