Word: leakey
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...find initially seemed unimpressive. Kamoya Kimeu, head of Anthropologist Richard Leakey's proficient fossil collecting team, last summer discovered a hominid skull fragment that was 1½ in. square on a rocky slope above northwest Kenya's Nariokotome River. But over a month's time, the expedition crew, under the joint leadership of Leakey, director of the National Museums of Kenya, and Alan Walker, professor of cell biology and anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, began to turn up other whisky-colored skeletal pieces in the nearby sandy debris: first a rib, then a scapula...
...press conferences in Washington and Nairobi, Leakey and Walker last week announced that they had unearthed the remains of a male specimen of Homo erectus. The hominid, given a catalog number of WT 15000, was one of a group that was directly ancestral to man and is known to have used fire and lived in caves as well as on the plains of Africa. Members of the species migrated as far as Asia, where the cranium of the so-called Java Man was discovered in 1891 and the Peking...
...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...
Their proposal was quickly | disputed by Anthropologist Richard Leakey. He said that White and Johanson's large afarensis males and small females were more likely two entirely different species that lived side by side some 3 million years ago. The temper of the debate was not helped by Johanson's 1981 book Lucy, which discussed the activities of the Leakey family in an intimate, gossipy way. Though the discovery of what may be an older version of Lucy seems to bolster the case for afarensis, partisans on both sides of the debate agree that more fossils will have...