Word: ancestors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ethiopia. Within weeks, more than 100 additional bone fragments were found during an intensive search-and-reconstruction effort that would go on for the next 15 years and culminate in a key piece of evolutionary evidence revealed this week: the 4.4 million-year-old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as Ardipithecus ramidus (abbreviated Ar. ramidus). (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...from surrounding sediments of the same time period, has generated an unprecedented amount of intelligence about one of our earliest potential forebears. The skeleton allows scientists to compare Ardipithecus directly with Lucy's genus, Australopithecus, its probable descendant. Perhaps most important, Ardi provides clues to what the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimps might have looked like before their lineages diverged about 7 million years ago. (See pictures of ancient skeletons...
Ardi is the earliest and best-documented descendant of that common ancestor. But despite being "so close to the split," says White, the surprising thing is that she bears little resemblance to chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives. The elusive common ancestor's bones have never been found, but scientists, working from the evidence available - especially analyses of Australopithecus and modern African apes - envisioned Great-Great-Grandpa to have looked most nearly like a knuckle-walking, tree-swinging ape. But "[Ardi is] not chimplike," according to White, which means that the last common ancestor probably wasn't either. "This skeleton...
...dead, the Harappan script sparks sometimes acrimonious debate in India over the nature of its origins. Scholars from southern India claim it ought to be linked to proto-Dravidian, the progenitor of languages like Tamil, while others think it is related to the Vedic Sanskrit of early Hinduism, the ancestor of Hindi and other languages spoken in India's north. And while cultural agendas within India have stymied collaborative efforts, the enmity between India and Pakistan has impeded archaeological breakthroughs. Ganeriwala, a desert site in Pakistan that possibly holds the ruins of one of the civilization's biggest cities...
...Proportion of Americans of Jewish descent who have an ancestor who lived on the Lower East Side after arriving in this country...