Word: extinctions
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...Wood believes, Lucy and the others may not be our direct ancestors at all but instead dead-end side branches of the family tree, like the Neanderthals. That would make them not our great-great-great-grandparents but rather ancient uncles and aunts whose lineages have long since gone extinct. One possibility is that Sahelanthropus gave rise to intermediate descendant species that have not yet been discovered. These descendants would have led to Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis, both of which are contenders for the first member of our genus, which arose about 2 million years...
Edmund Wilson was an excellent specimen of that now nearly extinct species: the all-around man of letters. During his long life (he outlived his friend and Princeton classmate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, by more than thirty years), he tried his hand at a wide variety of literary genres: from poetry and drama to fiction, journalism, history and polemics, as well as a voluminous (and decidedly indiscreet) journal. Primarily, sometimes exclusively, known as a literary critic (a fact that never failed to annoy him), he also found time to write an average of more than two-and-a-half letters...
...supernatural and came down from the clouds," wants funds for a language-immersion program, as only a handful of tribe members still speak their native language fluently. And the tribe hopes to publish an atlas of its Columbia River homeland with more than 1,000 native place names, long extinct...
Linguists at the University Of Manchester in Britain last week called attention to the world's endangered languages, some of which have as few as three speakers. Here is a stat that will leave you speechless: experts say 50% of the world's 6,000 languages may be extinct by 2050. These tongues include Tofa, spoken by some 200 in Siberia, and Votic, used by 30 people on the Russian coast of the Gulf of Finland. Other examples: --By Harriet Barovick...
...Burmese folklore, nats are restless and vengeful spirits, the souls of historical personages who died violently, victims of unjust crimes. If ignored or abused, they can cause serious mishap, but if correctly propitiated they can be persuaded to grant great favors. The place to appease them is an extinct volcano called Mount Popa, at the foot of which a stone sentinel stands guard. A massive pillar of rock riddled with meditation cells and capped with pale green and gold temples, the 737-m-high Popa Daung Kalat, or Popa Crest, shelters 37 of Burma's most powerful nats...