Word: ramipithecus
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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...Koobi Fora discoveries. What results is, in fact, a reinterpretation that alters the earlier hypothetical outline of man's evolution conceived before African discoveries at Koobi Fora and other sites. The basic hypothesis which Leakey then transforms claims that man's evolution involved a gradual transformation from simian, to Ramipithecus, to Australopithecus, and then finally, perhaps only 50,000 years ago, to modern man. However, Leakey contends in The People of the Lake that Australopithecus was a cousin of man, but not an ancestor...
According to Leakey, the Australopithecus branch and the evolutionary branch leading to man diverged several milion years ago, with the Australopithecus dying out, leaving man without phylogenetic cousins. Leakey replaces the older theory by offering another line of descent: from Ramipithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. This revision is significant because it creates the puzzle of the extinction of our Australopithecus cousins, and pushes back the time of man's origin much further than previously imagined, to perhaps 500.000 years...
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