Word: uses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Scientists have also unearthed new fossils of known species. This should help them trace the complex relations among our sundry ancestors. One remarkable skeleton, announced this past spring, suggests that modern humans and Neanderthals may even have mated successfully. And new evidence of stone-tool use, dating as far back as 2.5 million years, has provided tantalizing clues to how our forebears thought and behaved...
...picking up handy rocks--and the transition to meat eating. Then, somewhere between 2 million and 1 million years ago, came the dramatic growth of the brain and our ancestors' first emergence from Africa. Finally, just a few tens of thousands of years ago, our own species learned to use that powerful organ for abstract thought, which quickly led to art, music, language and all the other skills that have enthroned humans as the unchallenged rulers of their planet...
This wasn't just tool use; it was technology. Explains archaeologist Sileshi Semaw, a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, who helped find a huge cache of 2.6 million-year-old tools at Gona in the early 1990s: "The Gona hominids [carefully] selected workable raw materials." Since there are no local sources of such materials at Bouri, where the A. garhi fossils were found, the hominids must have carried their tools with them when they traveled there...
...expensive organ in terms of metabolism." It can grow larger only in a species that's routinely consuming high-energy food. One impetus for such growth--and in particular, the growth of the cognitive areas that distinguish ours from other large brains--could have come from our increasingly creative use of tools. Still, the ultimate use to which those big, sophisticated brains would be put would not appear for many hundreds of thousands of years...
Which brings us back to George W. Bush. Surely few care that he may have had a wild youth, if that means he dated many women or drank too much from time to time. But what about the illegal use of cocaine? Tens of thousands of Americans are serving mandatory jail sentences for having been caught with cocaine or its variant, crack. If Bush did try cocaine, how does that square with his support of Texas legislation putting those caught with less than a gram of the drug in jail...