Word: skeleton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...animals who make tools, or reason, or use fire, or laugh, or any one of a dozen other appealing oversimplifications. Here's one more description for the list, as good as any other: Humans are the animals who wonder, intensely and endlessly, about their origin. Starting with a Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in Germany in 1856, archaeologists and anthropologists have sweated mightily over excavations in Africa, Europe and Asia, trying to find fossil evidence that will answer the most fundamental questions of our existence: When, where and how did the human race arise? Nonscientists are as eager for the answers...
...crucial piece of evidence came in 1974 with the discovery of the long- sought "missing link" between apes and humans. An expedition to Ethiopia led by Donald Johanson, now president of IHO, painstakingly pieced together a remarkable ancient primate skeleton. Although about 60% of the bones, including much of the skull, were missing, the scientists could tell that the animal stood 3 ft. 6 in. tall. That seemed too short for a hominid, but the animal had an all important human characteristic: unlike any species of primate known to have come before, this creature walked fully upright...
...image was wrong. In 1957 American and British researchers re- examined the skeleton that Boule had studied and concluded that Neanderthals stood upright; the stooped posture of Boule's specimen was attributable to arthritis. Also the feet were not prehensile, nor was the | spine curved. They further noted that the Neanderthal's brain was as large as that of early modern humans, a fact that Boule ignored in his publications...
...opts not for love but for wandering. This type of movie could undercut all of the statements of modernity Leigh has spent two hours making. Johnny must continue his solitary, vagabond ways with only his sharp wit and active libibo. Like a modern-day Huck Fin, Johnny sees the skeleton that forms the basis of the human psyche, he also sees the skeletons in everyone's closet. With this knowledge and his determination, we hope he finds the meaning that he wants so much before his apocalyptic predictions actually materialize...
...volcanic ash in nearby rocks proved that. But it took laborious work by anatomist Owen Lovejoy to prove the knee belonged to a biped -- and thus, not entirely apelike -- primate. Lucy turned up nearby a year later, but it took weeks to piece her jumbled bones into a partial skeleton and years before anthropologists could agree on her place in human evolution...