Word: hominid
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...probably a male, that doesn't fit any known species. According to paleontologist Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers in France, whose team reported the find in Nature last week, there is no way it could have been an ape of any kind. It was almost certainly a hominid--a member of a subdivision of the primate family whose only living representative is modern man. And it has left scientists gasping with astonishment for several reasons...
...DIED. JIA LANPO, 92, Chinese archaeologist who directed the Peking Man excavation; in Beijing. Over six decades, Jia helped unearth a record 45 Homo erectus fossils from the Zhoukoudian site near Beijing. He discovered the first Chinese hominid fossils dating from the Pleistocene era that began 1.8 million years ago, bolstering the theory that modern Chinese are descended from these early men. DIED. WALLACE REYBURN, 87, war correspondent and author of 25 books, including Rehearsal for Invasion, the first-hand account of the ill-fated Dieppe raid of 1942; in London. A deadpan wit, he raised eyebrows with Flushed with...
When Haile-Selassie compared the newly discovered bones and teeth with those of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old hominid found in the Middle Awash in the early 1990s that was the previous record holder, he realized that the two creatures were very similar. But the older one's teeth, while different from an ape's, do have a number of characteristics that are decidedly more apelike than those of the younger hominid...
...foot to take on a distinctive shape--a shape that is readily apparent in the ancient toe bone. "If you compare a chimp's foot bones with its hand bones, they look the same because they're used for the same thing"--that is, for grasping--Haile-Selassie explains. "Hominid fingers and toes don't look alike...
Exactly how this hominid walked is still something of a mystery, though with a different skeletal structure, its gait would have been unlike ours. Details of kadabba's lifestyle remain speculative too, but many of its behaviors undoubtedly resembled those of chimpanzees today. It probably still spent some time in trees. It probably lived in large social groups that would include both sexes. And rather than competing with one another for mates, the males may well have banded together to defend the troop against predators, forage for food and even hunt for game...