Word: hominids
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DISCOVERED. The BONES of nine members of what some archeologists say is a new species of hominid that may have existed as recently as 12,000 years ago, at the same time as modern man; in Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia. Researchers say the findings, published last week in Nature, give weight to the case for a new species, which they have dubbed Homo floresiensis. Last year the 18,000-year-old remains of a 1-m-tall woman with a braincase the size of a chimpanzee were discovered at the same site. Some experts remain...
...Henry Gee, an editor at venerable Nature who was responsible for overseeing publication of the original H. floresiensis article, such squabbling is par for the course. "Science is a disputatious business, and human evolution is notorious for being even more disputatious. historically, whenever anyone discovers a new hominid, a lot of people come along and say it's an ape or a diseased human." Gee, who says the critics haven't shaken his belief that a new species has been found, cites the example of another hotly debated discovery, that of Australopithecus africanus in 1924, the so-called "missing link...
...It’s a mockery of hominid evolution,” he says. “I go through each year and make jokes about each type of student...
...love affair with sugar--and also with salt, another crucial but not always available part of the diet--goes back millions of years. But humanity's appetite for animal fat and protein is probably more recent. It was some 2.5 million years ago that our hominid ancestors developed a taste for meat. The fossil record shows that the human brain became markedly bigger and more complex about the same time. And indeed, according to Katherine Milton, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, "the incorporation of animal matter into the diet played an absolutely essential role in human evolution...
Genetic analysis tends to refute this claim. Among other things, Africans are more genetically diverse than any other people on Earth, which suggests that they have had longer to differentiate. And populations in eastern Africa, where most of the oldest hominid fossils have been found, are the most diverse of all. Finding this most ancient of Homo sapiens in Africa pretty much settles the argument. "It's not just another nail in the coffin for the multiregional view," says Rightmire. "It lowers the coffin into the ground." Declares White: "This is what stepped out of Africa...