Word: hominids
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...path of just such a discovery began in November 1994 with the unearthing of two pieces of bone from the palm of a hominid hand in the dusty Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. Within weeks, more than 100 additional bone fragments were found during an intensive search-and-reconstruction effort that would go on for the next 15 years and culminate in a key piece of evolutionary evidence revealed this week: the 4.4 million-year-old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as Ardipithecus ramidus (abbreviated Ar. ramidus). (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...series of studies published in the Oct. 2 special issue of Science - 11 papers by a total of 47 authors from 10 countries - researchers unveiled Ardi, a 125-piece hominid skeleton that is 1.2 million years older than the celebrated Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and by far the oldest one ever found. Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-leader of the Middle Awash research team that discovered and studied the new fossils, says, "To understand the biology, the parts you really want are the skull and teeth, the pelvis, the limbs and the hands and the feet...
...advocating this here." Even if they were, though, and even if paleontologists all agreed on the matter, Ida could at best be considered a first step on an evolutionary pathway that took another 40 million years to reach the divergence point between chimps and our earliest hominid ancestors. (See the secrets of London's buried bones...
...theory comes from recent analyses of the interior of the skull of Flo - as some call the 18,000-year-old fossil remains. A young female, Flo exhibits features that bear an uncanny resemblance to skulls from the hominid genus Australopithecus, which lived in Africa from roughly 4 million to 1.5 million years ago. The best-known australopithecene fossils are the 3.2 million-year-old A. afarensis Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia, and the 3 million-year-old A. africanus Taung Child, unearthed in South Africa. (See pictures of South Africa, fifteen years...
...record straight, it was the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that gave birth to the hominid's name, correct? Yes, the whole camp was listening to Beatles' tape because I was a great Beatles fan, and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was playing and this girl said, well if you think the fossil was a female, why don't you name her Lucy? Initially I was opposed to giving her a cute little name, but that name stuck. (See pictures of the Beatles' final performance together...