Word: woode
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...more immediate concern is the heavy air pollution caused in many places by combustion of wood and fossil fuels. A new U.N. Environment Program report warns of the effects of a haze across all southern Asia. Dubbed the "Asian brown cloud" and estimated to be 2 miles thick, it may be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from respiratory diseases...
...armored raft made of five layers of 1-in.-thick iron over wood extended well out over the hull, protecting the ship from ramming...
Where exactly Toumai falls in the evolutionary scheme of things, though, depends largely on whom you ask. A number of distinguished paleontologists, including Bernard Wood, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum, perceive the face to be jarringly modern--more modern even than Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, which is between 3.6 million and 2.9 million years old--and thus quite different from what they expected to see in such an ancient hominid...
Over the years since Lucy was found, several even older hominids, including Ardipithecus ramidus ramidus (4.4 million years old) and Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba (5.8 million), have been put forward as the most ancient of our direct ancestors. But Toumai is older still. If it is as modern looking as Wood believes, Lucy and the others may not be our direct ancestors at all but instead dead-end side branches of the family tree, like the Neanderthals. That would make them not our great-great-great-grandparents but rather ancient uncles and aunts whose lineages have long since gone extinct...
According to many anthropologists, Brunet's discovery supports the idea that evolutionary diversity was true for hominids as well. "My guess," Wood offers, "is that Sahelanthropus is the first of what will turn out to be a whole handful of apes and apelike creatures living throughout Africa 6 or 7 million years ago." In this bushy model of evolution, even a remarkably modern face might not guarantee that Brunet's new hominid was a direct ancestor of modern humans. Maybe it was just one of several modern-looking hominids that arose at about the same time...