Word: leakey
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...manlike creatures began to evolve five or six million years ago. In the years after the war, the discovery and dating of skeletal remains pushed the existence of man's direct ancestors back to 10 million and then to 14 million years. Now famed Kenya-born Anthropologist Louis Leakey has evidence that a manlike creature he has named Kenyapithecus africanus roamed over eastern Africa concurrently with apes 20 million years...
...Leakey actually fabricated Kenyapithecus africanus from bone fragments that he and other scientists had dug from the ground as long ago as 1947. Until recently, he himself had classified many of these fragments as belonging to apelike creatures called Sivapithecus africanus and Proconsul, which lived in Kenya during the Lower Miocene epoch, about 20 million years...
Kenyan Fragments. But in the early 1960s, a rare display of unity among anthropologists convinced Leakey that he had better reevaluate the classification of certain fossil bones. Most of his colleagues had become persuaded, Leakey says, that a collection of bone and teeth fragments he had found under a Kenya farm in 1961 and other fragments discovered in 1934 in the foothills of the Himalayas represented similar species of manlike beings that lived between 10 million and 14 million years ago-in the Upper Miocene. In the hopes of finding their ancestors, Leakey in 1965 began a search of museum...
Egyptian Diggings. Although he is currently raising funds to finance future diggings in Kenya, Leakey feels that he has little chance of finding the common ancestor of both man and the apes-a creature he believes may have lived some 40 million years ago, in the Oligocene epoch. Yale Paleontologist Elwyn Simons is working in Egypt's Fayum province, Leakey notes, an area rich in material from the Oligocene. His somewhat sad prediction: "He will be the man who gets the common link...
...NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). More on evolution. "Dr. Leakey and the Dawn of Man" deals with Anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey and his family of fossil hunters in East Africa. After more than 30 years, the Leakeys have made such finds as Zinjanthropus, a manlike creature believed to have lived 1,750,000 years ago, and the 2,000,000-year-old Homo habilis, who was found among some of the earliest signs of "culture," and is believed to be a direct ancestor of modern...