Word: stones
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This time Brooks plays a screenwriter, Steven Phillips, who, as everyone keeps telling him, has lost his edge. What he needs is a muse, who turns out to be a bubble-headed material girl (well played by Sharon Stone) who requires gifts from Tiffany in exchange for dopily delphic advice. The conceit is mildly amusing, but what Brooks actually seems to have lost is his comic rhythm. There's something distant and depressed about the film, which never develops the momentum it needs to link its occasional bright satiric moments into a convincing whole...
That alone would make A. garhi a prime candidate for the long-sought evolutionary link between Lucy's species and the first humans. But the researchers also found that nearby animal bones dating from the same period had been butchered with stone implements. Cut marks on one antelope jawbone suggest that the hominids used a sharp stone flake to remove the animal's tongue. The leg bone of another animal is scarred by cuts, chop marks and signs of hammering, evidence that it was scraped clean of meat and bashed open to expose the nutritious marrow...
Earlier discoveries at Gona, an Ethiopian site about 60 miles north of Bouri, had already shown that someone was using carefully manufactured stone tools in the area at about that time. Now Asfaw and White's team could make a circumstantial case that their species, A. garhi, was the gifted toolmaker. If so, this was a crucial bit of scientific sleuthing. In the 2 million years since the first human ancestor began to walk upright, nothing much had changed. Now something had. Rather than just using sticks and stones to leverage innate abilities--something done by plenty of animals, from...
Whoever did it, the creation of technology gave its inventors an astonishing advantage over other hominid species. Stone hammers and blades let them exploit carcasses left behind by other predators and permitted them to shift to an energy-rich, high-fat diet. "That," asserts Asfaw, "leads to all kinds of evolutionary consequences...
...COMMENT] The newest hominid species to be identified, H may have been the first to use stone tools and eat meat...