Word: hominids
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...Cambrian) that nature invented the animal body plans that define the broad biological groupings known as phyla, which encompass everything from classes and orders to families, genera and species. For example, the chordate phylum includes mammals, birds and fish. The class Mammalia, in turn, covers the primate order, the hominid family, the genus Homo and our own species, Homo sapiens...
...creatures begin to walk upright? Scientists believe this transformation probably occurred between 4 million and 6 million years ago, but until recently they had no fossils to back up their hypothesis. In 1994 researchers reported that they had found teeth and other fragments of a 4.4 million-year-old hominid in Ethiopia. But without key bones from below the waist, they could not say for sure how the animal moved...
...less than a year later, another team of paleontologists, led by Meave Leakey from the National Museums of Kenya and Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University, has announced the best evidence so far that a previously unknown species of hominid strode upright at least 4 million years ago. Their find, reported in last week's Nature, consists of complete upper and lower jaws, teeth from several individuals, a piece of skull, arm bones and a leg bone. Taken together, the fossils push the emergence of two-legged walking, or bipedalism, 500,000 years earlier than any other data had indicated...
Envious rivals railed at "Leakey's luck" in finding hominid fossils--yet of course it was not luck at all but rather a combination of energy, optimism, persistence, a superb field team--known among scientists as the "Hominid Gang"--and an intimate knowledge of his native terrain. He and Mary made many significant finds, notably the fossil of the species they named Homo habilis (handy man), the earliest known tool user. Since the death of Louis in 1972, his unwavering position that Africa was the cradle of humanity has been rewarded with universal acceptance...
...language). Like Lucy and her clan, known as Australopithecus afarensis, ramidus had teeth with some apelike and some human characteristics. But at least one specimen -- a baby molar still attached to a piece of an immature ramidus jaw -- resembles a chimpanzee tooth more than a molar from any known hominid. "It's obvious that it belongs to an ancestor of afarensis," says Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the Nature report and a leader of the international team that uncovered the new fossils...