Word: hominid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Spain's lower house of parliament approved a resolution supporting the Great Ape Project, an organization and manifesto founded by ethicists Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, which argues that three essential human rights - life, liberty and freedom from physical and psychological torture - should be extended to our closest hominid relatives. Joan Herrera, congressman for the Catalan Green Initiative party, justified the measure before parliament, saying that the primates "are capable of recognizing themselves, and have cognitive capabilities...
...world's oldest rock star is coming to Houston. Starting Aug. 31, the 3.18 million-year-old hominid skeleton known as Lucy (so dubbed because researchers were blaring the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds the night of her discovery) will headline the Houston Museum of Natural Science's (HMNS) new exhibit, "Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia" - only her third public appearance in nearly 30 years, and the kick-off to a planned six-year nationwide tour. But while HMNS curators celebrate Lucy's arrival, some famed paleontologists are grumbling that the rare opportunity simply...
...Reich's team measured how the evolutionary clock varied across chromosomes in the different species. To their surprise, they deduced that chimps and humans split from a common ancestor no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago. If they're correct, several hominid species now considered to be among our earliest ancestors--Sahelanthropus tchadensis (7 million years old), Orrorin tugenensis (about 6 million years old) and Ardipithecus kadabba (5.2 to 5.7 million years old)--may have to be re-evaluated...
...must have occurred more recently than 6.3 million years, and probably [even] more recently than 5.4 million years,” Reich said. These figures differ from previous estimates that the human-chimp split occurred 6.5 to 7.4 million years ago, a figure that was based on hominid fossils with distinctive human features dating from that period. “It suggests that there was gene flow after the development of human-like features, like upright walking,” Reich said. To explain the discrepancy between the appearance of human-like features and the later divergence date, the Broad...
...Glass, in which the White Queen explains to Alice that believing in impossible things is simply a matter of practice, seems happy to agree. More likely to start an argument is the author's novel proposition that the imperative to link cause and effect derived directly from our earliest hominid ancestors' discovery of tools as many as 2 million years ago. The ability to fashion a flint spear, he speculates, promoted a kind of causal thinking that was beyond other species: take a certain type of stone, hit it in just such a way, and it will leave a cutting...