Word: laetolil
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Dates: during 1975-1975
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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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