Word: leakeys
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When Anthropologists Louis Leakey and his wife Mary began their search for man's origins in the 1930s, they paused briefly in a dry, remote region of Tanzania called Laetolil (after the Masai name for a hardy regional flower). The area's volcanic ash yielded fossils of many extinct creatures, but none that were even vaguely human. So the Leakeys continued their work at a more promising site, some 25 miles to the north in neighboring Kenya, called Olduvai Gorge. There they found the remains of hominid creatures that pushed man's lineage back to some...
Last week Mary Leakey announced fresh findings that set man's genesis even deeper in the distant past. The evidence comes not from Olduvai but from Laetolil. Returning there after her husband's death in 1972, on a hunch "we didn't look hard enough," she began uncovering jawbones and teeth that seemed clearly human; that is, they belonged to the genus Homo (or true man), rather than to man-apes (like Australopithecus, who once was thought to be the forerunner of man but is now regarded as a possible evolutionary dead end). One clue...
...true Homo, they provide one more link in a growing chain of evidence that indicates man's direct ancestors were stalking Africa's savannas-walking upright, perhaps hunting and using tools-as long as 4 million years ago. In 1972, following in his parents' footsteps, Richard Leakey discovered a nearly complete manlike skull at nearby Lake Rudolf in Kenya that is at least 2.6 million years old. More recently, Carl Johanson of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, digging in Ethiopia's bleak Awash Valley, discovered a manlike jawbone that seems to be well over...
...anthropologists have been convinced that the first member of the genus Homo, or true man (as opposed to the hominids, or man-apes), was a beetle-browed, stoop-shouldered brute called Homo erectus, who appeared in Africa about a million or so years ago. But two years ago, Richard Leakey, following in the footsteps of his famed anthropologist father, the late Louis B. Leakey, undermined that theory. Digging near Kenya's Lake Rudolf, he uncovered fragments that were assembled into a nearly complete manlike skull that is at least 2.6 million years old. Leakey's find suggested that...
...Leakey rejects that notion, but he does side with Johanson on another conclusion. It has long been thought that man's direct ancestor prior to Homo erectus was a small, possibly toolmaking man-ape called Australopithecus, who lived in Africa as recently as 1.5 million years ago. If Johanson's jawbone belonged to a true Homo, the australopiths may well have had overwhelming competition from even smarter creatures who evolved into modern...