Word: paleoanthropologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mercurial relationship between Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi and renowned paleoanthropologist and wildlife advocate Richard Leakey has transfixed Kenyans for more than a decade. After first meeting Moi in 1968, Leakey gave occasional advice to the President, and in 1989 Moi made Leakey head of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Then came drama. Leakey quit and helped form an anticorruption opposition party; Moi branded him a neocolonial racist; a state-owned newspaper tied Leakey to the Ku Klux Klan; and progovernment thugs beat him when he attended a colleague's court hearing. "How much of it was deep [hatred...
...anthropologist, I firmly object to the theories presented by paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus [PALEONTOLOGY, May 3], who supports the idea that there was interbreeding between prehistoric Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. Archaeologists merely uncovered a single skeleton of a child with a mixture of modern and Neanderthal features. To deduce that this indicates a peaceful coexistence or gradual immersion of Neanderthals into the Homo sapiens gene pool is groundless and inconsistent in the face of DNA testing recently conducted. The Neanderthals, like other hominids, are no more. Perhaps mankind's evolution was a more violent affair than we would like...
...NEIL POSTMAN for example, who wrote on TV pioneer Philo Farnsworth, is the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, an acclaimed study of the impact of television on society. RICHARD RHODES, who profiled nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, wrote a Pulitzer-prizewinning tome on the making of the atom bomb. Paleoanthropologist DONALD JOHANSON, who discovered the fossil called Lucy, had a long and bumpy relationship with the Leakey family and used this occasion to break a silence with Richard Leakey that lasted nearly two decades...
...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 the start of "the truly scientific study of the evolution...
...what's the verdict? If you want reliable information about where our species came from, steer clear of these two books and consult any of the several very readable nonfiction works recently published on the subject. If you want to read a novel that uses a contemporary paleoanthropologist's discovery of thought-to-be-extinct-but-alive-after-all hominids to launch an ingenious and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be human, see if your local library or used-book store still has a copy of Vercors' You Shall Know Them, which was published back in the 1950s...