Word: hominid
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Even before Johanson assembled Lucy's remaining bones, he could see that she had been bipedal: the clue was a telltale knee joint. In addition, Lucy's tiny skull suggested a brain too small to place her among previously discovered toolmaking hominids. At first, Johanson and his partner, Timothy White of the University of California at Berkeley, tentatively classified her as Australopithecus africanus, a species discovered in 1924 by South African Anthropologist Raymond Dart. The team changed its view after locating the bones of 13 creatures roughly similar to Lucy in the Afar region, and comparing them with...
That timetable is highly controversial. For one thing, it would knock out of the running as the earliest hominid, or manlike creature, a favorite contender of many paleontologists, the small and apelike Ramapithecus (for the Hindu epic hero Rama), whose bones were first found in India and who died out some 10 million years ago. Perhaps more important, so recent a split would seem to allow far too little time for the development of a creature as sophisticated as modern...
Leakey devotes a large portion of The People of the Lake to explaining why the line of hominids leading to the evolution of man survived while the Australopithecene line died out. He argues that at some point our hominid line developed a complex economic system of gathering and hunting that required cooperation between individuals in a clan. This cooperative system, besides being intrinsically more productive, engendered the evolution of a special intellectual capability on the part of our pre-historic ancestors. The brains of our ancestors became increasingly subtle and complex because cooperation in a society requires that its members...
Leakey argues that this greater degree of " intelligence," along with the inherent efficiency of cooperative societies, may have allowed the hominid line to survive while our last cousins perished. Leakey develops this argument carefully and logically so that when he holds it up to the competing theory that our ancestors survived because they were more aggressive and domineering, his view makes more sense...
...north, where their fossil discoveries were to push back man's lineage by at least a million years. In 1975, on a hunch that "we didn't look hard enough," Mary returned to Laetolil. She soon began finding jawbones, teeth and other fossils that were clearly of hominid (manlike) origin. She and her coworkers, including her son Philip, also discovered thousands of fossilized tracks under a layer of ancient volcanic ash that had been eroded by seasonal water. Most were made by animals, but Philip, the younger brother of Anthropologist Richard Leakey (TIME Cover, Nov. 7), spotted several prints that...