Word: skulls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Many of the couple's most famous discoveries were hers. One of the earliest occurred in October 1948, when Mary caught the glint of a tooth during an expedition to Lake Victoria's fossil-rich Rusinga Island. It was part of the jaw and skull fragments of a creature called Proconsul africanus, then widely thought to be a human ancestor (though now considered more closely related to the apes). The discovery made them so "exhilarated and also utterly content with each other," Mary wrote in her 1984 biography, Disclosing the Past, "that we cast aside care..." She gave birth...
...worked her fossil-hunting magic again 10 years later. While Louis lay feverish in his tent, she burst in, shouting "I've got him! I've got him--our man!" The find, consisting of two bulges of brown fossilized molars protruding from a slope, turned out to be the skull of a 1.75 million-year-old human ancestor the Leakeys called Zinjanthropus ("Man from East Africa"). The discovery, notes paleoanthropologist F. Clark Howell of the University of California, Berkeley, marked the start of "the truly scientific study of the evolution...
...tooth fragments, they can't say for certain which species the fossil belongs to. By 1.9 million years ago, the Homo line had spawned at least two branches: Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis. The new fossil resembles both species in some ways, but without a more nearly complete skull it's impossible to say more. "What we have now is a hypothetical human lineage with very little evidence on it," says anatomist Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University. "This new fossil is another piece in the developing story...
What happened next is a matter of dispute. Peterson has told authorities that he wrapped the infant in a garbage bag and threw it in the motel's Dumpster. He says the baby was alive. But the autopsy reveals that the boy died from multiple skull fractures with injury to the brain "due to blunt force head trauma and shaking." The implication is that Grossberg and Peterson did not merely abandon the child but beat it and killed it. Delaware has charged the youths with murder. If they are found guilty, they could be executed...
...they leave the child at a hospital? True, young mothers, alone and terrified, have been known to abandon their newborns. But how could two secure, educated 18-year-olds convince themselves that this was the best of all alternatives? And if indeed they did crack the baby's skull, what possessed them to do so? To understand all is to forgive all, the old saying goes. Understanding Grossberg and Peterson seems a long...