Word: olduvai
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hominid," crowed Anthropologist Tim White when he spotted the first bone fragment, a portion of an elbow, lying on a layer of sand. Looking down, Expedition Leader Donald Johanson shouted, "There's part of a humerus right next to it!" That July 1986 find in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge marked the beginning of a startling discovery that was formally unveiled last week by White and Johanson. The team of ten U.S. and Tanzanian scientists unearthed 302 fossil bones and teeth that have yielded a more complete picture of modern humans' earliest direct ancestor, Homo habilis. The new material could alter...
...species that lived in eastern and southern Africa between 2 million and 1.5 million years ago, stood about the same height and had the same body build as Homo erectus, its successor. Homo habilis (literally, handy man) was the first human ancestor to make stone tools. The new Olduvai Gorge skeleton, however, suggests that Homo habilis was much smaller and more apelike than previously thought. If that is the case, says Johanson, the modern body type probably did not evolve until Homo erectus emerged some 1.6 million years ago. Moreover, the evolutionary changes leading to Homo erectus, which preceded modern...
Tough investigators are concentrated mostly in New York and in California, the Olduvai Gorge of the chivalrous gumshoe. By far the best known are the West Coast trio of Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Occasional readers of the form tend to confuse Ross with John D. MacDonald and Gregory Mcdonald. The first was born Kenneth Millar in 1915 and died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent...