Word: hominids
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...technique known as argon-argon dating. (This layering is still visible in places that have not been so heavily eroded, enabling the scientists to trace the area's geologic history.) The verdict, confirmed by a second dating method and by the other primitive animals found with the hominid remains: most of the fossils are between 5.6 million and 5.8 million years old, although one toe bone is a few hundred thousand years younger...
Like other members of the famous "hominid gang," the sharp-eyed fossil hunters employed by paleontology's Leakey family, Justus Erus spends three months a year scouring the dry, bone-rich riverbeds around Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya. It is a scrubby, desolate landscape, where the people are desperately poor and gun-toting young men are a menacing presence. But it is hallowed ground to scientists because of the clues it offers to early human history. Still, even after five years, Erus, a 30-year-old Turkana tribesman, had scored nary a hit--just bits of ancient animal bones...
...million and 1 million years ago, the then lush woodlands and savannas of eastern Africa--where our family tree first took root--were the habitat of rival species, most of which were evolutionary dead ends. But what about before that? Paleontologists have generally agreed that there was just one hominid line, beginning with a small, upright-walking species known as Australopithecus afarensis, most famously represented by "Lucy," a remarkably complete (about 40%) skeleton found in Ethiopia...
...That's right in Lucy's time. Yet it is so different from Lucy that they assign their fossil, which they call Kenyanthropus platyops, or "flat-faced man of Kenya," to a new genus, or grouping of species. "This means we will have to rethink the early past of hominid evolution," says Meave Leakey, head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya. "It's clear the picture isn't as simple as we had thought." Even Lucy's discoverer, Donald Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, concurs. "This is a reminder that there...
...authors think the species went east to Asia and gave rise to the Asian branch of H. erectus, perhaps then turned north and finally west back to Europe. The fossil record in Europe is especially spotty, with about a million years separating the Dmanisi finds and any other hominid remains...