Word: zinjanthropus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...