Word: erectus
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Richard, meanwhile, continued his rise to prominence. Fossil finds such as the astonishingly complete 1.6 million-year-old skeleton of an African Homo erectus (Homo ergaster to some) and the Black Skull have added immeasurably to our knowledge of human origins. His career benefited from best-selling books, a television series on human evolution and popular lecture tours...
...journal Science Friday, it's not in the caves of Zhoudoudian, China. What was previously thought to be a 500,000-year-old fireplace there turns out to lack the tell-tale traces of wood ash. That leaves us with no evidence that our distant ancestor Homo Erectus had any idea how to set the world alight. Which is a problem, because Homo Erectus is supposed to have been busy colonizing the coldest climes of Asia back then. How on earth did he do it without a way to keep the home fires burning? "In essence," said biologist Steve Weiner...
Paleontologists don't pretend to know everything about how Homo erectus lived, but it's a safe bet the ancient prehumans passed their days in unremarkable ways. Their language was probably little more than a system of gestures and grunts. Their diet, consisting of foraged fruits and crudely cooked animals, was not an easy one to force down--if the attachment points on their skulls for stout chewing muscles and their large front teeth suggest anything. Their skill in making tools was limited: a flaked stone or a crude ax was probably as good as it got. They arose...
...seemed. According to research published last week in the journal Science, Homo erectus may not have gone so quietly into that good night. On the Indonesian island of Java, it now appears, a small group of hangers-on may have lived as recently as 27,000 years ago, thriving in a world that Homo sapiens had long before claimed...
...been a good place to dig. Its equatorial climate makes it home to countless species, and periodic land bridges placed it in the middle of the migratory autobahn between Asia and Australia, making it the perfect spot to study how animals spread. Since the 1890s, numerous fossils of Homo erectus have been found on the island, but scientists were particularly intrigued by more than a dozen partial skulls found near the villages of Ngandong and Sambungmacan in the 1930s and 1970s. The skulls had unusually large braincases, and so were estimated to be anywhere from...