Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then, four months ago, Asfaw and White's team made another dramatic announcement. A fragmentary skull found near Bouri, an Ethiopian village in the Middle Awash region northeast of Addis Ababa, could well be from the missing australopithecine that sired the human race (see cover photo). Excavated in 1997, its jutting face and upper jaw filled with large teeth clearly belong to a species more advanced than A. afarensis yet more primitive than the earliest humans...
...carefully manufactured stone tools in the area at about that time. Now Asfaw and White's team could make a circumstantial case that their species, A. garhi, was the gifted toolmaker. If so, this was a crucial bit of scientific sleuthing. In the 2 million years since the first human ancestor began to walk upright, nothing much had changed. Now something had. Rather than just using sticks and stones to leverage innate abilities--something done by plenty of animals, from chimps to otters to finches--someone had deliberately selected and modified specific raw materials in a sophisticated and consistent...
...last December gives new life to the old idea. Co-discoverer Joao Zilhao, director of the Portuguese Institute of Archaeology, and consultant Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., claim that the 24,500-year-old remains of a four-year-old child show a mix of human and Neanderthal features. The boy could simply be the love child from a single prehistoric one-night stand--except that the last true Neanderthals had disappeared from the area at least 3,000 years earlier. Plenty of experts are unwilling to be swayed by romance, however--especially the American Museum...
...others believe, represents a single, profound change: the development of symbolic thought. "Art, symbols, music, notation, language, feelings of mystery, mastery of diverse materials and sheer cleverness: all these attributes, and more, were foreign to the Neanderthals and are native to us," he writes in his 1998 book, Becoming Human. For the first time, innovation was a routine part of human life that could easily be shared with others--not just something that occurred every million years or so. Against that kind of competition, no other human species could hold...
...development of symbolic thought and complex communication did nothing less than alter human evolution. For one thing, high-tech transportation means that the world, though ethnically diverse, now really consists of a single, huge population. "Everything we know about evolution suggests that to get true innovation, you need small, isolated populations," says Tattersall, "which is now unthinkable...