Word: olduvai
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...late 1950s the anthropological team of Louis and Mary Leakey?Richard's parents?began finding, at Olduvai Gorge and other East African sites, remains similar to those uncovered by Broom. They produced convincing evidence that the massive-jawed robustus, which weighed 45 to 67.5 kg. (100 to 150 lb.), existed in the region nearly 2 million years ago. In the same deposits, the Leakeys also discovered pebbles chipped to form sharp-edged implements?evidence that even so far back, man's ancestors knew how to make tools...
...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 2 million years ago-at least a million years farther into the dark shadows of prehistory than had previously been suspected...
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...
Died. Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey, 69, bluff, indomitable archaeologist who argued that his excavations added a million years to man's known presence on earth; of a heart attack; in London. From the Olduvai Gorge in what is now Tanzania, Leakey and his wife, Mary, unearthed the 1.75 million-year-old remains of the Zinjanthropus (East Africa Man) in 1959. One year later they uncovered the slightly older remains of the Homo habilis, which Leakey identified as the first primitive tool-user. These discoveries, Leakey asserted, demonstrated that different species of men existed simultaneously and proved that their...
...check his theory, Bada dated a number of objects, including an ancient hominid bone dug up from East Africa's Olduvai Gorge by Anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey. Its age, based on amino-acid dating, turned out to be 135,000 years-almost exactly the same as that deduced by Leakey from indirect geological evidence. Bada is still incredulous over the seemingly accurate results obtained by using his new clock. "It was so obvious and simple," he says, "I was just amazed that it hadn't been discovered before...