Word: erectus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...himself the creature would hardly have been a match for a hippo or any other large animal he might have encountered. Scarcely 5 ft. tall, he probably weighed no more than 120 lbs. Yet he did show promise. Most anthropologists now regard Homo erectus (literally, erect man) as modern man's immediate ancestor...
...time the spoors were made, Africa was also inhabited by another upright hominid called Australopithecus, or ape of the south. This manlike creature is generally regarded to have been an evolutionary dead end, and not a human forerunner. Remains of both Australopithecus and Homo erectus have been found around Lake Turkana. But researchers believe the footprints more closely resemble those of Homo erectus; they are larger and more widely spaced (which indicates a longer stride) than those associated with Australopithecus, if they are Homo prints, they are the first ever found of an immediate ancestor of modern...
According to Leakey, the Australopithecus branch and the evolutionary branch leading to man diverged several milion years ago, with the Australopithecus dying out, leaving man without phylogenetic cousins. Leakey replaces the older theory by offering another line of descent: from Ramipithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. This revision is significant because it creates the puzzle of the extinction of our Australopithecus cousins, and pushes back the time of man's origin much further than previously imagined, to perhaps 500.000 years...
...then turned down an evolutionary dead-end street and disappeared. But science has learned what happened to habilis. With a brain-half again as big as his neighbors', he not only adapted to his environment but evolved. Habilis passed his genes along to an improved model called erectus, who evolved into modern man, a creature Shakespeare more accurately called "the paragon of animals...
That does not mean the evolution of intelligence has ended on the earth. Judging by the record of the past, we can expect that a new species will arise out of man, surpassing his achievements as he has surpassed those of his predecessor, Homo erectus. Only a carbon-chemistry chauvinist would assume that the new species must be man's flesh-and-blood descendants, with brains housed in fragile shells of bone. The new kind of intelligent life is more likely to be made of silicon...