Word: molar
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...there are only low voices and the twick of computers heralding the new century. The clovelike smell of printer's ink has already been subdued by cleaning solvents and fresh paint. The absence is marked, though, by a great, gaping hole in the back shop, as if a huge molar had been yanked...
...more than that. Suwa had uncovered nothing less than a new chapter in the history of human evolution. He and his colleagues report in the current , Nature that the archaic molar, along with other fossils they found in the area on expeditions in 1992 and 1993, belong to a previously unknown species. This diminutive, humanlike creature walked the earth some 4.4 million years ago -- half a million years earlier than the oldest human ancestors ever identified. That stretches our family tree back almost to the era when humans and apes branched off from a single ancestor. In fact, says University...
...exactly the case with the new species, which now bears the scientific name Australopithecus ramidus (ramid means root in the local Afar language). Like Lucy and her clan, known as Australopithecus afarensis, ramidus had teeth with some apelike and some human characteristics. But at least one specimen -- a baby molar still attached to a piece of an immature ramidus jaw -- resembles a chimpanzee tooth more than a molar from any known hominid. "It's obvious that it belongs to an ancestor of afarensis," says Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the Nature report...
PERCY HAS a computer in his head, apparently. More unfolds the water-supply plot with the symmetry and cunning of a Creole Hercule Poirot. But agents more intimidating than Bionic Bridge players lie at the end of the molar-mystery. More discovers a kiddie-porn racket which Percy depicts too graphically for my taste...
...idea, of course, is that molar sodium 24 has zonked out both pedophiliac and pedophiliee to such a degree that they have become numb, orgiastically numb, to the horror of their situation...