Word: zinjanthropus
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...drove back to camp to tell my father Louis. As he remembered it, she rushed in crying, "I've got him! I've got him! I've got him!" What my mother Mary had discovered were the fragments of a fossil skull that was later to be named Zinjanthropus boisei. It was to rivet world attention on the Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and on the work of my parents...
...only well-preserved fossil hominid to have been found outside South Africa, several thousand miles to the south. Unlike the South African sites, which lacked distinct geological layers, Olduvai offered a chance to get some real ages for the fossils. Using a method known as potassium-argon dating, Zinjanthropus was determined to be 1.75 million years old. At the time, this was staggering. It almost tripled the skull's estimated age, which had been obtained by geological interpretation. It stretched back our evolutionary perspective. Since that day, hundreds of hominid fossils have been discovered across a wide range of African...
...Mary's 1959 discovery of the Zinjanthropus cranium at Olduvai that captured worldwide attention and made the Leakeys a household name. Building on this find, Louis and Mary attracted a multidisciplinary team of specialists to work at Olduvai and launched the modern science of paleoanthropology, the study of human origins...
Following the success of Zinjanthropus, Louis began spending less and less time at Olduvai, which became Mary's domain. For most of the next 25 years she worked and lived there with her staff, her dogs and selected visitors. Until his death in 1972, Louis visited occasionally but spent most of his time traveling around the world, lecturing and raising funds to support an ever expanding list of research projects. Most notable were the field studies he launched of the living great apes: Jane Goodall's chimps, Dian Fossey's gorillas and Birute Galdikas' orangs...
...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...