Word: kenyapithecus
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...making their persuasive case for Ramapithecus as the first hominid, Simons and Pilbeam dispute a competing claim by the Kenyan anthropologist, Louis Leakey. Two years ago Leakey announced that 20 million-year-old fossils that he had discovered near Africa's Lake Victoria and dubbed Kenyapithecus africanus belonged to the earliest known manlike creature (TIME, Feb. 3, 1967). After applying their dental tests' to casts of Leakey's prehistoric fragments, the Yalemen decided that Kenyapithecus lacked the characteristics of early man. Though Leakey still insists that Kenyapithecus is a hominid, most other scientists now believe that...
...earliest ancestors, says Anthropologist Louis Leakey, was a puny creature named Kenyapithecus africanus that inhabited the earth 20 million years ago. Bones that Leakey found in his native Kenya are the basis of this conclusion. But they also raise a troubling question. How did the weakling those bones belonged to ever survive his hostile environment? He would have been no match for faster and more powerful carnivorous beasts, such as the forebears of lions and leopards, and man did not begin making weapons capable of warding off attacks from big cats until about 2,000,000 years...
...years after the war, the discovery and dating of skeletal remains pushed the existence of man's direct ancestors back to 10 million and then to 14 million years. Now famed Kenya-born Anthropologist Louis Leakey has evidence that a manlike creature he has named Kenyapithecus africanus roamed over eastern Africa concurrently with apes 20 million years...
Leakey actually fabricated Kenyapithecus africanus from bone fragments that he and other scientists had dug from the ground as long ago as 1947. Until recently, he himself had classified many of these fragments as belonging to apelike creatures called Sivapithecus africanus and Proconsul, which lived in Kenya during the Lower Miocene epoch, about 20 million years...
...bone fragments of the Lower Miocene-and came across the familiar Sivapithecus and Proconsul remains. Applying 14 standard tests of the shape and size of jawbones and teeth to these long-ignored bone fragments, Leakey concluded that their characteristics were definitely more manlike than apelike, and reclassified them as Kenyapithecus africanus. Unlike the rectangular, one-rooted molars of apelike creatures, for example, the Kenyapithecus' molars were triangular and had two roots. Its incisors were in line with its canines; ape incisors protrude in front of the canines. Kenyapithecus' chin projected slightly to the front of its teeth...