Word: southern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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According to conventional wisdom, this evolutionary breakthrough came at a time when climate change was transforming eastern and southern Africa from dense forest into open grassland. Standing upright in such an environment could have offered our ancestors many advantages. It could have let them scan the horizon for predators, exposed less body surface to the scorching equatorial sun (and, conversely, more to the cooling wind) or freed their hands for carrying food...
Given their 2 million-year-plus life-span, the australopithecines were surely one of evolution's better experiments. But nature is an inveterate tinkerer, even with successful species. Between 3 million and 1.9 million years B.P., several variations on the Australopithecus theme popped up in eastern and southern Africa, including A. africanus, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus and A. boisei. (Just to complicate matters, the last three are assigned by some experts to an entirely different genus, Paranthropus...
...figuring out how they arose, how they were related and what they evolved into--those that weren't evolutionary dead ends--has proved elusive. Not only is the fossil record full of holes, but the hominid species from eastern Africa haven't shown up in southern Africa, and vice versa. A remarkably preserved skeleton found in South Africa's Sterkfontein cave could change all that. Believed to be at least 3.3 million years old, the bones may belong to A. afarensis, making it the first of Lucy's species uncovered in that area. But the skeleton hasn't been fully...
...spinnaker and full mainsail. And in those conditions they'll jibe the boat, with the spinnaker--at night, in the dark, alone!" Getting home alive was victory enough in the 1996-'97 race. Sixteen boats started from Biscay; nine finished. A Canadian sailor, Gerry Roufs, vanished in the Southern Ocean like a distant light winking out. The elaborate communications web binding Roufs' boat to the race's land handlers simply went dead...
...ever written about sailing--in this case the extreme sailing required to go around the world solo in the toughest of all sailboat races, the Vendee Globe. Aboard wide-beamed, thin-hulled, 60-ft. racing machines--surfboards for maniacs, once they get to the 50-ft. waves of the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica--the Vendee Globe competitors are bound by brutally simple rules. They stipulate one boat, one person, no help, no stops, first home wins. The 27,000-mile course starts in November in the Bay of Biscay on the coast of France; points south through the horse...