Word: homo
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...wrenching tableau. A brutalized Jesus is displayed by Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, who announces derisively, "Ecce Homo," behold the man. A mob, ostensibly made up of Jesus' fellow Jews, responds with a bloodthirsty roar. They fill a massive courtyard; there must be a thousand of them...
...Ethiopia's Rift Valley Research Service found a third, the skull of a 6-or 7-year-old child, shattered into about 200 pieces. After years of painstaking cleaning, reassembly and study, the team was confident enough to tell the world that it had found the earliest true Homo sapiens--older by at least 1,000 generations than anything previously discovered. "It's not a modern human," says White, "but it's so close that there's no doubt it will become one. The child, in particular, is so like us that you couldn't distinguish it in a population...
White and his colleagues think these hominids are distinctive enough to merit their own subspecies, which the team has dubbed Homo sapiens idaltu. (Idaltu means elder in the Afar language.) But whether or not the nomenclature holds up, says paleoanthropologist G. Philip Rightmire of the State University of New York at Binghamton, "the key point is that they are from the right place at the right time to be, broadly speaking, the ancestor of modern people. It's as near as we're going...
Another controversy has to do with where modern humans first appeared. Everyone agrees that a hominid called Homo erectus left its African home some 2 million years ago to populate the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Long after that, argues one camp, Homo sapiens evolved, also in Africa, and began a second exodus. In contrast to this out-of-Africa scenario, the so-called multiregionalists say there was no second sojourn. The far-flung Homo erectus communities and their descendants, the multiregionalists believe, could have interbred enough that Homo sapiens appeared pretty much everywhere at once...
...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...