Word: hominid
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...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 primitive. Given the family resemblance, Leakey and Walker assigned the fossils to the same genus, Australopithecus, and gave the new species the name anamensis (anam is the Turkana word...
Then, in 1994 and 1995, teams working in Ethiopia and Kenya announced that they had each found a new species of hominid. Both discoveries smashed the 4 million-year barrier. The first--and at 4.4 million years, the oldest--was dug up by an international team in the Middle Awash region of Ethiopia, about 50 miles south of where Lucy was discovered...
...enamel, suggesting a diet rich in easy-to-chew fruits and vegetables. The new species, says paleontologist Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley, a co-leader of the expedition, "is way closer to an ape than to an australopithecine and is significantly different from any other hominid...
...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...
Several of the bones underscore that A. anamensis did indeed walk upright, some 500,000 years before the next oldest two-legged hominid known. But these creatures didn't walk in the modern sense. As Leakey explains, "They weren't nearly as efficiently upright as we are, and they had relatively short legs. They had a form of locomotion that we don't know today because there isn't anything equivalent...