Word: fossils
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Experts are now scrambling to decide how this discovery changes the already complicated saga of humanity's origins. The longer scientists study the fossil record, the more convinced they become that evolution did not make a simple transition from ape to human. There were probably many false starts and dead ends. At certain times in some parts of the world, two different hominid species may have competed for survival. And the struggle could have taken a different turn at almost any point along the way. Modern Homo sapiens was clearly not the inevitable design for an intelligent being. The species...
...more description for the list, as good as any other: Humans are the animals who wonder, intensely and endlessly, about their origin. Starting with a Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in Germany in 1856, archaeologists and anthropologists have sweated mightily over excavations in Africa, Europe and Asia, trying to find fossil evidence that will answer the most fundamental questions of our existence: When, where and how did the human race arise? Nonscientists are as eager for the answers as the experts, if the constant outpouring of books and documentaries on the subject is any indication. The latest, a three-part Nova show...
...despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn't fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate...
...Nature article came only a week after an even more surprising report in the competing journal Science. U.S. and Indonesian researchers said they had redated fossil skull fragments found at two sites on the island of Java. Instead of being a million years old, as earlier analysis suggested, the fossils appear to date back nearly 2 million years. They are from the species known as Homo erectus -- the first primate to look anything like modern humans and the first to use fire and create sophisticated stone tools. Says F. Clark Howell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley: "This...
...deep into the soft ground. Eventually, the lake dried. The mud turned to rock and so, gradually, did her bones. She might have rested there undisturbed forever but for the roaring geologic forces that ripped the earth apart over the next 30,000 centuries, finally thrusting the long-buried fossil bones to the surface -- where American anthropologist Donald Johanson would find them in 1974. Named Lucy, after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, this long-dead primate, half-a-million years older than any known human- related species, revolutionized scientists' understanding of human origins...