Word: sapient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...some quarters the legend persists that apes are humans who abdicated society to live a carefree jungle life. This delightful fiction, the authors say, explains why apes do not speak; they would then be instantly recognized as sapient and forcibly returned to civilized responsibility...
Wilson, director of the Franklin book program for underdeveloped countries, was called a "sympathetic and imaginative disseminator of the achievements of scholarship; sapient leader of a fine university press...
Though he is only 36, Crandall wears a sapient beard and looks like a keg with hair. When he opens his mouth, one expects to hear Tosca in native Italian. But Crandall was born in Kansas, went to Millsaps College in Mississippi, one of the better small colleges in the South. He worked as an announcer on half a dozen radio stations before going into the now-widespread talk-to-the-listeners game on CKEY in Toronto four years...
...lines split from a single parent stock, homo erectus, and at different times independently developed into homo sapiens. "Homo erectus, then, evolved into homo sapiens not once but five times, as each subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a more brutal to a more sapient state...
...third conclusion is the most controversial. Coon suggests that the different racial lines became home sapiens at different times; thus, all though the Caucasoid stock became sapient relatively early, Negroes passed the threshold recently--perhaps only 50,000 years ago, or as much as 150,000 years later than Caucasoids. Racists have eagerly misinterpreted this as proof of the "primitiveness" of Negroes, although Coon suggests no such thing. Such an interpretation is disastrously false: there has never been any proof of social differences in intelligence, or mental characteristics of any kind, with the exception of certain non-biological, culturally conditioned...