Word: fossilizing
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...most exciting of the recent discoveries have come from East Africa and Richard Leakey, In 1972, Bernard Ngeneo, a Kenyan member of Leakey's fossil-hunting team, spotted a few scraps of bone exposed by erosion in sandy sediments in a steep gully near Lake Turkana's eastern shore. Working carefully, the Leakey team sifted scores of additional fragments out of the soil, then turned them over to Meave Leak ey, a paleontologist, and Anatomist Bernard Wood for assembly. As the last pieces of the six -week reconstruction job were put in place, the team mem bers found themselves staring...
...habilis?from whom man could have descended?coexisted with Australopithecus, thus weakening arguments that the latter was man's direct ancestor. Then, in 1975, the Turkana site yielded a Homo erectus skull resembling that of Peking man and with a brain size of 900 cc. The age of the fossil, about 1.5 million years, showed that Homo erectus had emerged even earlier and was hunting in the African plains while Australopithecus still roamed the earth. Because the more advanced Homo erectus was almost certainly a direct ancestor of modern man, the new skull, in the view of some anthropologists, effectively...
Scientists believe they are closing in on the time when this earliest form of man emerged. Fossil evidence shows the split that produced the first human must have occurred longer ago than 3.5 million years?the age of the oldest known Homo fossils, which were found in 1975 by Mary Leakey. Again, the rigorous demands of savanna living may have been responsible for the branching out. Australopithecus africanus, straining to augment its food supply in the flat grasslands, began to eat meat?probably obtaining it not by hunting, but by scavenging the kills left behind by large predators. Australopithecus robustus...
...theories are based on embarrassingly few fossil fragments, and that huge gaps exist in the fossil record. Anthropologists, ruefully says Alan Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, "are like the blind men looking at the elephant, each sampling only a small part of the total reality." His colleagues agree that the picture of man's origins is far from complete...
Young Leakey's self-confidence was justified; the Turkana region has proved to be an anthropological mother lode. In a basin several kilometers deep, walls of strata lie exposed, many-layered sandwiches of volcanic ash and ancient sediments containing the remains of complete prehistoric environments. Organizing a team of fossil hunters, Leakey established a base camp at Koobi Fora, a mound at the inboard end of a long, crocodile-infested sand spit that curves out into the lake. Then he began following his nose?with remarkable success. Turkana has yielded the richest accumulation of remnants of man and his predecessors...