Word: fossils
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...discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue of Nature. Leakey's excitement is understandable: the find casts doubt on a widely held belief that the human lineage arose from the earliest known species of Australopithecus. It also upsets the accepted view of australopithecine evolution...
Last summer Walker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, was looking for baboon fossils, when he spotted the skull fragment. By studying volcanic ash and other bones nearby, his colleagues determined the skull's age. Its pedigree was trickier. It has the structure of a late australopithecine: wide palate, huge rear molars, enormous cheekbones and a pronounced crest of bone running along the top of the skull. But other features -- a for- ward-thrusting muzzle, an orangutan-size brain and an apelike jaw structure -- are primitive. Leakey believes this mosaic suggests, as he has argued for years...
...fossil record had also apparently shown that the australopithecines evolved in an orderly way: first came afarensis, followed by africanus, then robustus and boisei. But the age and form of WT 17000 convinced Leakey and Walker that the lineage was not simple after all. Boisei did not descend from robustus, and probably not even from afarensis...
...anthropologist at the City University of New York's Lehman College. "Relationships among australopithecines will need to be somewhat revised." That will not surprise anthropologists. Although the current diagram of humanity's family tree is based on thousands of specimens, most of them are frustratingly incomplete. Walker's fossil may force a revision in the textbooks, but it is not likely to be the last...
...Harvard does not realize that what is crucial about American companies in South Africa is not so much how they treat their employees, but what they produce, import, and invest in. What is crucial is the moral and political support they lend to that fossil of history, the most racist country on the face of this earth, South Africa." (Text of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's letter to President Bok, March...