Word: sivapithecus
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Leakey actually fabricated Kenyapithecus africanus from bone fragments that he and other scientists had dug from the ground as long ago as 1947. Until recently, he himself had classified many of these fragments as belonging to apelike creatures called Sivapithecus africanus and Proconsul, which lived in Kenya during the Lower Miocene epoch, about 20 million years...
...similar species of manlike beings that lived between 10 million and 14 million years ago-in the Upper Miocene. In the hopes of finding their ancestors, Leakey in 1965 began a search of museum drawers and showcases for bone fragments of the Lower Miocene-and came across the familiar Sivapithecus and Proconsul remains. Applying 14 standard tests of the shape and size of jawbones and teeth to these long-ignored bone fragments, Leakey concluded that their characteristics were definitely more manlike than apelike, and reclassified them as Kenyapithecus africanus. Unlike the rectangular, one-rooted molars of apelike creatures, for example...
...South African teeth, Dr. Gregory also found connections with Peking Man, the orangutan, and Sivapithecus, a manlike fossil ape discovered many years ago in India. The geological character of the ground, however, indicated that Dr. Broom's creatures lived relatively late in the Glacial Age, by which time definitely human types such as Peking Man, Piltdown Man and Heidelberg Man had already appeared. Plesianthropus and Paranthropus thus appeared as laggard survivors of a much earlier evolutionary spurt-"conservative cousins of man," says Dr. Gregory, "and progressive cousins of the modern apes...
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