Word: homo
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Whenever these diversionary tales threaten to get interesting, the She-rat interrupts with further animadversions against Homo sapiens. The narrator complains, "Her talk, that nasal piping, grumbling, muttering, went on and on." Indeed it does, drowning everything, including patience, in a sea of recrimination and invective. The preachiness of The Rat ultimately grows fatiguing and self-negating. If the human race is truly as pigheaded and suicidal as it is portrayed here, then such a book will only add to the "garbage mountain" from which the She-rat speaks her eulogy...
Until now, most anthropologists have believed that Homo habilis, a species that lived in eastern and southern Africa between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago, stood about the same height and had the same body build as Homo erectus, its successor. Homo habilis (literally, handy man) was the first human ancestor to make stone tools. The new Olduvai Gorge skeleton, however, suggests that Homo habilis was much smaller and more apelike than previously thought. If that is the case, says Johanson, the modern body type probably did not evolve until Homo erectus emerged some 1.6 million years ago. Moreover...
Earlier discoveries of Homo habilis fossils consisted only of skulls, teeth and questionable limb bones, forcing scientists to guess at the creature's size and proportions. But the dramatic new find, which includes skull, arm bones, thigh and shin fragments from a single adult female, permits a more accurate assessment. The length of the thigh bone is a gauge of height, and the relative length of the upper arm bone to the upper leg bone is a vital clue to body build. The remains, described in the British journal Nature last week, belong to a creature that lived about...
...proportions of the skeleton were also a surprise to the scientists. The upper arm bone is about 95% as long as the thigh bone, indicating that the arms dangled to the knees, much as they do in apes. Thus Homo habilis closely resembled Australopithecus afarensis, of which the best-known example is the famed "Lucy" skeleton, which was discovered by Johanson in 1974. Lucy's ratio is 85%; in modern humans, the figure is about...
...Observes Johanson: "The new specimen suggests that the body pattern we call modern did not appear until Homo erectus and that it happened fairly rapidly." Says White, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley: "The question is, Why did they lose those features, and what made them change in just 200,000 years...