Word: erectus
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Beetle-Browed Brute. Johanson's conclusion is bound to cause controversy in the scientific community. Most anthropologists have been convinced that the first member of the genus Homo, or true man (as opposed to the hominids, or man-apes), was a beetle-browed, stoop-shouldered brute called Homo erectus, who appeared in Africa about a million or so years ago. But two years ago, Richard Leakey, following in the footsteps of his famed anthropologist father, the late Louis B. Leakey, undermined that theory. Digging near Kenya's Lake Rudolf, he uncovered fragments that were assembled into a nearly...
...than one thousand nine hundred and twenty years of A.D., and five thousand years of B.C., through all of the years and years of the Jewish calendar . . . before Hector was a pup, through the Neolithic and Paleolithic ages, back through and before the Darwin man, the Dover man, Pithecanthropus Erectus, and all of the fathers of the fathers...
...coming pygmy Homo habilis, or skillful man, and recognize him as a direct ancestor of modern man. He thinks that a prehuman creature called Kenyapithecus lived in East Africa 12 million years ago and evolved into Homo habilis and at least two other different types, notably Australopithecus and erectus, a near man that includes both Java and Peking man. From Homo habilis, Leakey believes, are descended both Neanderthal man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens). His theory, if correct, would trace man's ancestry back to the Pliocene Age, roughly 1,850,000 years...
...simply. Rejecting the conventional concept that races are rather recent--anywhere from several hundred years old to a few tens of thousands of years old--he postulates that racial differentiation took place early along five geographically separate lines. Each of these lines split from a single parent stock, homo erectus, and at different times independently developed into homo sapiens. "Homo erectus, then, evolved into homo sapiens not once but five times, as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state...
...have seen them. Heuvelmans suspects that they are related to the nittaewo, the semi-aborigines of Ceylon, who were killed off about 1800 by the primitive Veddahs. Heuvelmans' theory is that much of southern Asia was inhabited long ago by small, hairy descendants of Java's Pithecanthropus erectus, who were largely exterminated by the invading humans. The orang pendeks, hiding deep in Sumatran jungles, may be the sole survivors...