Word: jawed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...while the new discovery brings paleontologists closer to solving the mystery of Homo's origin, it still falls frustratingly short. Although the scientists found a nearly complete upper jaw, 10 teeth and a number of tooth fragments, they can't say for certain which species the fossil belongs to. By 1.9 million years ago, the Homo line had spawned at least two branches: Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis. The new fossil resembles both species in some ways, but without a more nearly complete skull it's impossible to say more. "What we have now is a hypothetical human lineage with...
Then two veteran fossil hunters from the local Afar tribe, exploring near a dry stream bed, spotted something out of place: two pieces of a prehistoric upper jaw that had eroded from a hillside. "The instant we fit the jaw together," says William Kimbel, science director of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, California, and a leader of the expedition, "we knew we weren't dealing with an apelike Australopithecus [the scientific name for Lucy...
...fact, as the researchers explain in a report that will appear in the December Journal of Human Evolution, the jaw belonged to the genus Homo, the line that includes modern Homo sapiens. The fossil has been dated at 2.33 million years old--arguably the oldest Homo fossil ever found, and right in the middle of the mystery zone. What's more, the bones were found near stone tools of the same age--the oldest combination of bones and artifacts ever discovered...
...they have. And there's plenty of evidence of climate change at the Hadar site. Near the jaw and tools, the team recovered fossils of grazing antelopes, indicative of an open, fairly grassy habitat, rather than forest-dwelling species like impala, which were so prevalent in Lucy's time...
Although opponents of Question One claim that rubber-jaw traps do not cause injury, when a dog named Cindy was caught in three such traps for four days, her injuries were so severe that she was put to sleep. To escape the traps, Cindy had tried to chew off her paws. "She was crying as she did it from the pain," says Joy Bannister, the Fall River dog officer who found...