Word: skullful
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...world's weather triggered punishing rains in Ethiopia. The deluges not only exposed buried fossils but also drove away the people of Herto and their livestock, which would have trampled the fragile bones. When White and the others happened to drive by the village, they noticed a fossil hippo skull poking out of the ancient sand. On closer examination, the skull bore marks indicating that the animal had been gashed with a stone tool. Clearly, human ancestors had once lived there...
When the scientists returned 11 days later, it took them only minutes to find the skulls of two adults, probably male. Six days after that, Berhane Asfaw of Ethiopia's Rift Valley Research Service found a third, the skull of a 6-or 7-year-old child, shattered into about 200 pieces. After years of painstaking cleaning, reassembly and study, the team was confident enough to tell the world that it had found the earliest true Homo sapiens--older by at least 1,000 generations than anything previously discovered. "It's not a modern human," says White...
...Handle" is an understatement. Cut marks on the skulls indicate that the overlying skin, muscles, nerves and blood vessels were removed, probably with an obsidian flake. Then a stone tool was scraped back and forth, creating faint clusters of parallel lines. The modification of the child's skull is even more dramatic. The lower jaw was detached, and soft tissues at the base of the head were cut away, leaving fine, deep cut marks. Portions of the skull were smoothed and polished...
...than two months prematurely. After gazing at Roy in his incubator in the neonatal intensive-care unit of Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, I strolled past a row of bassinets containing other newborns. At the end lay a child with seaweed-colored skin stretched tight over his skull. I motioned to the young attending doctor, figuring she hadn't yet noticed his death. She had. The child's lungs were underdeveloped, she explained, and lack of oxygen at birth meant he would suffer severe mental and physical handicaps. The parents, preferring not to raise a disabled boy, asked...
Lewis, after packing up his Montana rocks and taking the buffalo skull off his wall, will be gone from his University Hall office for good...