Word: homo
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...hundred meters up the road, opposite the shiny new Ecce Homo Catholic church is another remainder of that night's fatal frenzy: a van reduced by fire to a charred frame on wheels. Inside, on seat springs that have had the cushion burned away, a blackened, desiccated corpse arches in agony. Nine people died in the vehicle, villagers say. And there were other victims, whispers Diran, who is squatting by the soccer pitch, puffing on a cigarette. "I don't know how many were chased into the forest and killed." He shrugs and gestures up the road in its direction...
...widely assumed that in mammals and especially primates (including the subset Homo sapiens), this wholesale manufacture of new brain parts had long ago been phased out by evolution. With a greater need to store memories for the long haul, these creatures would need to ensure that the engrams weren't disrupted by interloping new cells...
...Fossil bones found there are far more ancient than human remains found anywhere else. But when and why our ancestors first ventured away from the mother continent to take up residence in other parts of the world have been matters of debate. The conventional wisdom had long held that Homo erectus, the immediate ancestor of Homo sapiens, made the exodus about 1 million years ago, after developing relatively sophisticated stone tools that enabled him to gather food more efficiently during his wanderings...
...that wisdom was upset in 1994, when a Homo erectus skull from Indonesia was dated to 1.8 million years B.P. (before the present). And while that discovery was disputed by some scholars, a find reported in last week's Science should end all doubt. Cranial bones from two H. erectus individuals, discovered in Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia, have been dated to at least 1.7 million years B.P. What's more, researchers unearthed at the site primitive stone implements resembling those found at H. erectus digs in Africa, proving that fancy tools weren't the trigger for the departure...
...erectus bones found outside Africa, these new ones are closest in form to African H. erectus--and may belong to a distinct species, Homo ergaster, which some experts have until now assigned to Africa. Since modern Homo sapiens is believed to have descended directly from H. ergaster, the discovery of closely related bones in Eurasia suggests that our own species may have evolved outside the ancestral continent or arisen in several places simultaneously. Says Swisher: "If you have the ancestral form outside Africa, then you have to entertain those thoughts...