Word: leakey
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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...
...trickier. It has the structure of a late australopithecine: wide palate, huge rear molars, enormous cheekbones and a pronounced crest of bone running along the top of the skull. But other features -- a for- ward-thrusting muzzle, an orangutan-size brain and an apelike jaw structure -- are primitive. Leakey believes this mosaic suggests, as he has argued for years, that Johanson is wrong and that his reconstruction of afarensis is actually based on two different species. And, Leakey says, the new fossil, labeled WT 17000, resembles one of them...
...fossil record had also apparently shown that the australopithecines evolved in an orderly way: first came afarensis, followed by africanus, then robustus and boisei. But the age and form of WT 17000 convinced Leakey and Walker that the lineage was not simple after all. Boisei did not descend from robustus, and probably not even from afarensis...
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