Word: leakeys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prevent his book from becoming an endless series of dated skulls and cranium sizes, Leakey goes beyond the cell of paleontology. He uses his fossil discoveries to speculate about the nature of ancestral societies. Leakey pieces together his chips and bones and then tries to pinpoint social and economic attributes of the hunter-gatherer bands that once inhabited the earth...
This is difficult business. The fossils presently available barely tell us what our progenitors looked like, much less the socio-economics of the nomadic hordes in which they allegedly roamed. But Leakey is intelligent and conscientious, and he treads carefully where the footing is not firm, taking pains to warn the reader when he lacks evidence to substantiate his conclusions. Moreover, Leakey seems to have absorbed every tiny fact ever written pertaining to his field and, consequently, his contentions come across as carefully considered and tenable. It is the breadth of Leakey's knowledge in the field and the skilled...
...first few chapters are the least controversial, but are readable and illuminating nevertheless. Essentially, Leakey traces the history of paleontology and what it has been able to tell us about our ancestors. But along the way, Leakey adds his new theories based on the Koobi Fora discoveries. What results is, in fact, a reinterpretation that alters the earlier hypothetical outline of man's evolution conceived before African discoveries at Koobi Fora and other sites. The basic hypothesis which Leakey then transforms claims that man's evolution involved a gradual transformation from simian, to Ramipithecus, to Australopithecus, and then finally, perhaps...
According to Leakey, the Australopithecus branch and the evolutionary branch leading to man diverged several milion years ago, with the Australopithecus dying out, leaving man without phylogenetic cousins. Leakey replaces the older theory by offering another line of descent: from Ramipithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. This revision is significant because it creates the puzzle of the extinction of our Australopithecus cousins, and pushes back the time of man's origin much further than previously imagined, to perhaps 500.000 years...
Throughout the earlier chapters, Leakey breaks the somewhat monotonous account of paleontological history with amusing anecdotes. He tells about his friend almost being gobbled up by a crocodile while swimming in Lake Turkanay be offers insights into the personalities of big-time anthropologists and paleontologists and draws the reader into the world of bones and fractured skulls until the reader begins to share his enthusiasm...