Word: kimbell
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That's true even if, as some experts suspect, the specimen is really as little as 2.5 million years old. Complete skeletons are so rare that even such a relative youngster will inevitably flesh out the book of human evolution as few discoveries ever have. Says William Kimbel, science director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University: "It will give us what we got from Lucy, and more...
Chances are that if the answer exists, it is waiting in Hadar. Kimbel and his colleagues realized several years ago that it was an ideal place to look for clues to humanity's immediate family because Lucy's bones didn't come from the most recent rocks in the area. By combing through younger rocks, the scientists hoped to uncover clues to what came later. The newly announced jawbone is among the first fruits of that labor, but it probably won't be the last...
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...
...there were good arguments on the other side. While modern humans don't vary much in size, other early hominids did. Besides, argues William Kimbel of the IHO, principal author of the Nature report, if there really were two species, then we have just happened to find only females from one and males from the other -- an almost inconceivable coincidence...
Those proportions, and comparisons between the grandson and other, more fragmentary skulls both large and small, convince Kimbel and his colleagues that afarensis was indeed a single species, as they had believed all along. The arm bones, too, appear to bolster this idea. According to Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist at University College London, they have exactly the robust, curving form you would expect from a tree climber. The two sexes didn't have different kinds of skills, she says, but were both "a mosaic, bipedal from the waist down and arboreal from the waist...