Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...still shaken by the discovery last August of a child-kidnapping ring that preyed on young girls. A 12-year-old and a 14-year-old who had been abducted and raped were freed from a macabre underground dungeon in a home of the accused ringleader, Marc Dutroux, near the southern city of Charleroi. Police dug up the bodies of four other girls, ages 8 to 19, missing for more than a year. The tragedy transfixed Belgium, and national TV broadcast their funerals live. Shock then turned to outrage when it was disclosed that Dutroux was a convicted kidnapper-rapist...
...little more than a week ago, the grand promenade to Mars turned into a near Earth lob shot, when a booster malfunction sent the spacecraft plummeting back to Earth shortly after its launch. For a time it looked as if the craft was going to hit Australia, endangering the outback not just with debris but also with the 270 grams of plutonium it was carrying as a power source. That disaster was averted when the ship sailed past the continent and plopped ignominiously into the Pacific...
Then two veteran fossil hunters from the local Afar tribe, exploring near a dry stream bed, spotted something out of place: two pieces of a prehistoric upper jaw that had eroded from a hillside. "The instant we fit the jaw together," says William Kimbel, science director of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, California, and a leader of the expedition, "we knew we weren't dealing with an apelike Australopithecus [the scientific name for Lucy...
...Human Evolution, the jaw belonged to the genus Homo, the line that includes modern Homo sapiens. The fossil has been dated at 2.33 million years old--arguably the oldest Homo fossil ever found, and right in the middle of the mystery zone. What's more, the bones were found near stone tools of the same age--the oldest combination of bones and artifacts ever discovered...
...transformed much of Africa's moist woodlands into dryer, more open savannah. Was the development of tools and a more upright stance an evolutionary strategy to cope with the rigors of the new environment? Perhaps. But until now nobody had found a Homo fossil that dated back anywhere near 2.7 million years...