Word: hominids
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Paleoanthropologists uncover the remains of a strapping hominid...
...find initially seemed unimpressive. Kamoya Kimeu, head of Anthropologist Richard Leakey's proficient fossil collecting team, last summer discovered a hominid skull fragment that was 1½ in. square on a rocky slope above northwest Kenya's Nariokotome River. But over a month's time, the expedition crew, under the joint leadership of Leakey, director of the National Museums of Kenya, and Alan Walker, professor of cell biology and anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, began to turn up other whisky-colored skeletal pieces in the nearby sandy debris: first a rib, then a scapula...
...press conferences in Washington and Nairobi, Leakey and Walker last week announced that they had unearthed the remains of a male specimen of Homo erectus. The hominid, given a catalog number of WT 15000, was one of a group that was directly ancestral to man and is known to have used fire and lived in caves as well as on the plains of Africa. Members of the species migrated as far as Asia, where the cranium of the so-called Java Man was discovered in 1891 and the Peking...
Thus far, more than 70 bones and fragments have been attributed to WT 15000. No two are duplicates and all are of the same stage of maturity, indicating that they belonged to the same individual. The only missing pieces of the skeletal puzzle are the hominid's left arm and hand, the right arm from the elbow down, and most of both feet. Leakey hopes to unearth those fragments next summer. The only other known near complete Homo erectus was discovered in 1975 by Leakey across Lake Turkana from the present dig. But that hominid had suffered from...
...leader of the Lucy expedition, Anthropologist Donald Johanson, touched off a major anthropological controversy by lumping Lucy and other East African fossils into a single new species, which they called Australopithecus afarensis (apeman from Afar). These Lucy-type creatures, they said, were common ancestors of two distinct hominid lines-the australopithecines, which presumably died out, and the strain that 'led eventually to Homo sapiens...