Word: fossilizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...happens, new fossil finds made by other investigators, operating quite independently, are closing the gap by showing that Australopithecus is really much older than had been thought-in fact, as much as 6,000,000 years...
Ferocious Neighbors. The evidence comes, in part, from Africa's Omo River Basin, a fossil-rich area where the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and the Sudan meet. There, a University of Chicago expedition has found 40 prehistoric teeth and two jawbones buried in volcanic ash that is perhaps 4,000,000 years old. The expedition's leader, Anthropologist F. Clark Howell, is convinced that the creatures are members of the Australopithecus family, even though they must have belonged to a branch that probably did not eat meat or make tools. Despite their proximity to various ferocious neighbors...
While the geologists, chemists and physicists are busy with their investigations, other scientists will be on an even more exciting quest. Biochemists will be examining the specimens for evidence of amino acids and protein molecules?the building blocks of life. Paleontologists will seek fossil remnants of organisms. At NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., still other investigators will try to coax life itself from the lunar rocks, using nutrients in the hope of resuming a life process that might have been interrupted millions of years...
...proponents of the new theory themselves admit, it is still only theory. They are not working with fossil teeth and jaws but with habits and customs that naturally left no physical trace. All that they have guessed about man's biological history remains to be proved. But the guesses carry many implications. Perhaps the most significant is that civilization's splendid institutions owe a part of their balance to the wily jungle primate still surviving beneath man's cultural veneer. He is really a part of the design. His contribution, only just beginning to be perceived...
...Harvard undergraduates, Frank Sulloway '69, explained recently that the film will examine the influence of South America on Darwin's theory of evolution in terms of people, places, flora, fauna, geological formations and fossil deposits...