Word: fossilizing
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...study, based on a new analysis of fossil sites, has created a tempest in the paleontological community. Now researchers not only must explain how a single prehuman population could remain frozen in evolutionary amber for so long after its species went extinct elsewhere in the world, but also must revisit two of science's most hotly debated questions: Where on the habitable continents did modern humans first emerge, and how did they come to dominate the world? "These dates will stir up a lot of controversy," says geochronologist Carl Swisher of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in Berkeley, California, who headed...
...fossil hunters studying evolution, Java has always 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...
...Africa. She worked for decades--painstakingly, methodically--in his shadow, but by the time Mary Leakey died last week, at 83, in Nairobi, Kenya, her scientific reputation had surpassed that of her more famous husband. "Louis was always the better publicist," says her son Richard, a world-class fossil hunter in his own right. "But Mary was the centerpiece of the research...
Many of the couple's most famous discoveries were hers. One of the earliest occurred in October 1948, when Mary caught the glint of a tooth during an expedition to Lake Victoria's fossil-rich Rusinga Island. It was part of the jaw and skull fragments of a creature called Proconsul africanus, then widely thought to be a human ancestor (though now considered more closely related to the apes). The discovery made them so "exhilarated and also utterly content with each other," Mary wrote in her 1984 biography, Disclosing the Past, "that we cast aside care..." She gave birth...
...Olduvai Gorge, the famous Great Rift Valley site in Tanzania where the Leakeys did much of their digging, Mary worked her fossil-hunting magic again 10 years later. While Louis lay feverish in his tent, she burst in, shouting "I've got him! I've got him--our man!" The find, consisting of two bulges of brown fossilized molars protruding from a slope, turned out to be the skull of a 1.75 million-year-old human ancestor the Leakeys called Zinjanthropus ("Man from East Africa"). The discovery, notes paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell of the University of California, Berkeley, marked...