Word: fossils
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Even if ramidus didn't walk upright, however, another of the recently discovered human ancestors certainly did. Less than a year after A. ramidus made headlines, a team led by Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya (wife of well-known fossil hunter Richard Leakey) and Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University revealed that it too had found fossils of an ancient human ancestor at two sites near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Not only is the new hominid very old, dating to 4.2 million years B.P., but it is similar in some ways to A. afarensis--though clearly more...
...skeleton does include many bones that will help White's team answer the much more important question of how Ardipithecus got around. Paleoanthropologists believe that bipedalism was the first significant modification separating our ancestors from the great apes. By studying the bones and fossil footprints of A. afarensis (Lucy and her line) as well as those of half a dozen other australopithecine species, scientists already knew that our ancestors walked upright long before they acquired other human traits--and that bipedalism gave them a huge edge...
...these ideas may be in trouble. Fossilized seeds, petrified wood and animal bones found by White and his colleagues at the digging site, near the village of Aramis, indicate that it was quite densely wooded when A. ramidus lived there. If the hominid turns out to have been bipedal, as preliminary studies indicate, this could wash away existing theories--though the scientists can't say for sure until other hominid fossil sites of comparable age are found...
...seems determinedly indifferent. As the lawmakers prepare for their summer adjournment, legislative efforts to slow that warming by reducing greenhouse emissions have all but ground to a halt. Withering too, like so many cornstalks, are other major pro-environmental bills: increased funding for research on energy sources other than fossil fuels; incentives to encourage industries to cut emissions; efforts to clean up power plants; and measures to raise fuel-efficiency standards for gas-slurping SUVs, vans and light trucks. Just about the only measure likely to pass is, of all things, an order requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to give...
...economy. But it also has political drawbacks--offending such traditional Democratic constituencies as the miners who could lose their jobs if the demand for coal drops, and rallying the opposition of powerful industries like oil and the utilities, which would face traumatic changes by a switch away from fossil fuels...