Word: leakey
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...time, many thought the finds showed that the hulking robustus had been intelligent enough to make tools. Then in 1961 Jonathan Leakey, another of Louis' sons, unearthed parts of a 1.8 million-year-old skull that failed to fit easily into the familiar Australopithecus mold. The creature's teeth were more manlike than those of Australopithecus and the brain was larger; whereas Australopithecus brains averaged 450 to 550 cc. in volume, the cavity of the skull found by Jonathan Leakey indicated that it had contained a brain measuring nearly 700 cc. That was considerably smaller than modern man's brain?...
...most exciting of the recent discoveries have come from East Africa and Richard Leakey, In 1972, Bernard Ngeneo, a Kenyan member of Leakey's fossil-hunting team, spotted a few scraps of bone exposed by erosion in sandy sediments in a steep gully near Lake Turkana's eastern shore. Working carefully, the Leakey team sifted scores of additional fragments out of the soil, then turned them over to Meave Leak ey, a paleontologist, and Anatomist Bernard Wood for assembly. As the last pieces of the six -week reconstruction job were put in place, the team mem bers found themselves staring...
...believe they are closing in on the time when this earliest form of man emerged. Fossil evidence shows the split that produced the first human must have occurred longer ago than 3.5 million years?the age of the oldest known Homo fossils, which were found in 1975 by Mary Leakey. Again, the rigorous demands of savanna living may have been responsible for the branching out. Australopithecus africanus, straining to augment its food supply in the flat grasslands, began to eat meat?probably obtaining it not by hunting, but by scavenging the kills left behind by large predators. Australopithecus robustus...
...probably more than any others, hastened the differentiation between man and earlier hominids. Explains Anthropologist Charles Kimberlin ("Bob") Brain of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria, South Africa: "Meat eating and hunting were important factors. If you remained a vegetarian, the necessity for culture was not nearly as great." Richard Leakey too believes that hunting helped to make emerging man a social creature. Says he: "The hominids that thrived best were those able to restrain their immediate impulses and manipulate the impulses of others into cooperative efforts. They were the vanguard of the human race...
Perhaps no one is trying harder to fill in the blanks than Richard Leakey. Picking up where his father Louis left off at his death in 1972, Richard?with his Lake Turkana discoveries ?has already moved to the forefront of modern anthropology. Now he is reaching out to coordinate research throughout East Africa and taking the lead in sorting and assembling the thousands of fragments of evidence that may someday reveal the secrets of man's origins...