Word: erectus
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...potassium-argon method. Both gave scientists techniques by which they could accurately determine the age of the strata in which fossilized bones were found, and sometimes the age of the bones themselves. Using these new tools, they have determined that Java man and Peking man, now classified as Homo erectus, walked the earth more than 500,000 years...
...found by Jonathan Leakey indicated that it had contained a brain measuring nearly 700 cc. That was considerably smaller than modern man's brain?which averages 1,400 cc.?but large enough to suggest that it had belonged to a being that fit ideally between Australopithecus and Homo erectus. Louis Leakey and his colleagues named him Homo habilis (handy man), because they believed him to be the manufacturer of the tools found in the vicinity...
...skull and a similar find, labeled 1590, proved that Homo habilis?from whom man could have descended?coexisted with Australopithecus, thus weakening arguments that the latter was man's direct ancestor. Then, in 1975, the Turkana site yielded a Homo erectus skull resembling that of Peking man and with a brain size of 900 cc. The age of the fossil, about 1.5 million years, showed that Homo erectus had emerged even earlier and was hunting in the African plains while Australopithecus still roamed the earth. Because the more advanced Homo erectus was almost certainly a direct ancestor of modern...
...result of these findings is a radical revision of long-held views of evolution. As recently as a decade ago, scientists talked about a direct, unbranching line of descent ?Australopithecus, Homo erectus, modern man?one following the other in logical order. Now all that has changed. "We can no longer talk of a great chain of being in the 19th century sense, from which there is a missing link," says Phillip Tobias, 51, Dart's successor as professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand medical school in Johannesburg. "We should think rather of multiple strands forming...
Leakey rejects that notion, but he does side with Johanson on another conclusion. It has long been thought that man's direct ancestor prior to Homo erectus was a small, possibly toolmaking man-ape called Australopithecus, who lived in Africa as recently as 1.5 million years ago. If Johanson's jawbone belonged to a true Homo, the australopiths may well have had overwhelming competition from even smarter creatures who evolved into modern...