Word: leakey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...million-year-old ape-man called Australopithecus boisei. The discovery surprised Walker, since he and most anthropologists believed the boisei species had evolved 2.2 million years ago. "This is probably more significant than almost anything we've had for a good number of years," says Anthropologist Richard Leakey, one of Walker's coauthors of a report about the fossil in last week's issue of Nature. Leakey's excitement is understandable: the find casts doubt on a widely held belief that the human lineage arose from the earliest known species of Australopithecus. It also upsets the accepted view of australopithecine...
...single species, Australopithecus afarensis, which includes the celebrated 3 million-year-old skeleton called Lucy, was the common ancestor of all later australopithecines, as well as man. The two branches, they say, split about 3 million years ago, with the Australopithecus line dying out 1 million years ago. Leakey, on the other hand, believes the common ancestor is an older species, which is yet to be found...
...duplicates and all are of the same stage of maturity, indicating that they belonged to the same individual. The only missing pieces of the skeletal puzzle are the hominid's left arm and hand, the right arm from the elbow down, and most of both feet. Leakey hopes to unearth those fragments next summer. The only other known near complete Homo erectus was discovered in 1975 by Leakey across Lake Turkana from the present dig. But that hominid had suffered from a degenerative bone disease, and therefore the find was useless as an archetype of the species...
...strapping youth," says Leakey. "We used to think of our ancestors as rather puny and rather fragile. This shows them to be much stronger and better built than we ever imagined." Full grown, Leakey says, the boy might have reached 6 ft. Added Walker: "He's bigger than most human populations around the world today." Walker concedes that he does not know for sure if the specimen is a freak, but in a limited sample from a larger population, odds strongly favor the selection of the most common denominator...
Just as startling as the hominid's size is its anatomical similarity to modern man. Says Leakey: "Those who want to have a funny-looking thing as an ancestor 1½ million years ago will be disappointed. He's very human. That's what's so exciting. There were real people wandering about then." -By Jamie Murphy. Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington and Maryame Rollers/Nairobi