Word: laetolil
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...species discovered in 1924 by South African Anthropologist Raymond Dart. The team changed its view after locating the bones of 13 creatures roughly similar to Lucy in the Afar region, and comparing them with other hominid fossils found in 1975 by the well-known anthropologist Mary Leakey, in Laetolil, Tanzania. Above all, Lucy's unusual dental and cranial features convinced the pair that she was of a different species...
...distinctly non-manlike animal remains, they moved on to Olduvai Gorge, 25 miles to the north, where their fossil discoveries were to push back man's lineage by at least a million years. In 1975, on a hunch that "we didn't look hard enough," Mary returned to Laetolil. She soon began finding jawbones, teeth and other fossils that were clearly of hominid (manlike) origin. She and her coworkers, including her son Philip, also discovered thousands of fossilized tracks under a layer of ancient volcanic ash that had been eroded by seasonal water. Most were made by animals, but Philip...
Leakey and her team compared the footprints with some left 80,000 years ago by Neanderthal man, generally accepted as the earliest human prints. Only about 15 cm (6 in.) long, but 11˝ cm (4˝ in.) across?much wider than either those of Neanderthal or modern man?the Laetolil markings indicate a manlike primate about 1.2 meters (4 ft.) tall that probably walked with what Leakey calls "a slow, rolling gait," like a chimpanzee's. Though there were many animal tracks nearby ?including some of knuckle-walking apes?Leakey is "75% certain" that the prints were those...
When Anthropologists Louis Leakey and his wife Mary began their search for man's origins in the 1930s, they paused briefly in a dry, remote region of Tanzania called Laetolil (after the Masai name for a hardy regional flower). The area's volcanic ash yielded fossils of many extinct creatures, but none that were even vaguely human. So the Leakeys continued their work at a more promising site, some 25 miles to the north in neighboring Kenya, called Olduvai Gorge. There they found the remains of hominid creatures that pushed man's lineage back to some...
Last week Mary Leakey announced fresh findings that set man's genesis even deeper in the distant past. The evidence comes not from Olduvai but from Laetolil. Returning there after her husband's death in 1972, on a hunch "we didn't look hard enough," she began uncovering jawbones and teeth that seemed clearly human; that is, they belonged to the genus Homo (or true man), rather than to man-apes (like Australopithecus, who once was thought to be the forerunner of man but is now regarded as a possible evolutionary dead end). One clue...
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