Word: paleoanthropologist
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...this leaves the question of how Neanderthals got their thick-as-a-brick reputation in the first place. "The original idea of Neanderthal dumbness," says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University (in St. Louis, Mo.), "emerged around the turn of the last century." People back then had a stake in believing that modern humans were the pinnacle of evolution, and because Neanderthals were clearly different physically, they had to be inferior." The new work by Zilhão and his colleagues, says Trinkaus, "is just one more important piece in that puzzle that says these people may have looked...
...shoulder bones show that she wasn't a knuckle walker and didn't spend much time hanging or swinging ape-style in trees. Rather, she moved along branches using a primitive method of palm-walking typical of extinct apes. "[Ardi is] a lovely Darwinian creature," says Penn State paleoanthropologist Alan Walker, who was not involved in the discovery. "It has features that are intermediate between the last common ancestor and australopithecines...
...neck. Analysis of various anatomical features suggests that the new species has an overall body plan that looks more ancient than that. "It's not identical to Australopithecus," Jungers says, "but it resembles it in limb proportions, the shape of the bony pelvis, the hands." Adds paleoanthropologist Donald Johansen, who discovered the Australopithecus Lucy: "It is a possibility they got out of Africa earlier than we ever thought. If they were isolated on an island and didn't have gene flow from other populations, it would make sense that they retained ancient features like small stature and small heads...
...Paleoanthropologist Donald C. Johanson is the man who found the woman that shook up our family tree. In 1974, Johanson discovered a 3.2 million-year-old fossil of a female skeleton in Ethiopia that would forever change our understanding of human origins. Dubbed Australopithecus afarensis, she became known to the world as Lucy. In the years since, Johanson and his colleagues have unearthed a total of 363 specimens of Australopithecus afarensis that span 400,000 years. His new book, Lucy's legacy: The Quest for Human Origins picks up where his 1981 New York Times bestseller, Lucy: The Beginning...
...other. Rampasasa "makes the short-stature argument completely irrelevant," says skeptic Alan Thorne, an anthropologist at the Australian National University. "There are plenty of Pygmies in that area. In the case of these bones, it was probably a diseased Pygmy." Counters Peter Brown, the University of New England paleoanthropologist who co-wrote the Nature report with a colleague, archaeologist Michael Morwood: "Of course, there are small-bodied people on Flores, but they don't have brains one-third the size of ours, or unusually shaped pelvises or very long arms like H. floresiensis. They are just small modern humans...