Word: erectus
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After quickly tracing the development of life from the first crude cells (which cry "Free! *&#! We're free!" as they "colonize the open ocean") to the first primates, Gonick moves on to early pre-history in volume two, "Sticks and Stones. Homo Erectus, Neanderthal and the more advanced Cro-Magnon human of the Stone Age give way to the Homo Sapiens of the first post-ice age settlements of 12,000 years ago. Volume two ends with the founding of cities in Sumer, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Four billion years in 100 pages...
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...
...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...