Word: olduvai
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...evaluate scientific evidence before reaching any conclusions; Louis, on the other hand, was often impulsive and cavalier in his proclamations. Rigorous in her approach, intensely focused and remarkably diligent, Mary quickly set new standards in the study of African prehistory, culminating in her stunning monographs on the archaeology of Olduvai Gorge...
...Mary's 1959 discovery of the Zinjanthropus cranium at Olduvai that captured worldwide attention and made the Leakeys a household name. Building on this find, Louis and Mary attracted a multidisciplinary team of specialists to work at Olduvai and launched the modern science of paleoanthropology, the study of human origins...
...Olduvai Gorge, the famous Great Rift Valley site in Tanzania where the Leakeys did much of their digging, Mary worked her fossil-hunting magic again 10 years later. While Louis lay feverish in his tent, she burst in, shouting "I've got him! I've got him--our man!" The find, consisting of two bulges of brown fossilized molars protruding from a slope, turned out to be the skull of a 1.75 million-year-old human ancestor the Leakeys called Zinjanthropus ("Man from East Africa"). The discovery, notes paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell of the University of California, Berkeley, marked...
...heart of the right-wingers' argument is their lingering hope that, as other generations believed, our species was singled out for a special creation in God's own image. They continue to insist that there are no transitional forms in the fossil record, no "missing links," though the Olduvai Gorge, along with other African sites, provides a procession of evolving hominids, mute but eloquent witnesses to our Darwinian past, including those children of the dawn, the australopithecines, the little "southern apes" who walked like...