Word: hominids
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ancestor, White hints that his team has already discovered hominid fossils that are more than 5 million years old, though he refuses to elaborate before detailed studies are completed. But Leakey and Walker readily acknowledge that they are studying two 5.5 million-year-old hominid teeth and a similarly ancient jaw fragment with an embedded tooth from a site in northern Kenya. "They look like australopithecines with lots of primitive features," Walker says, but there isn't enough evidence from these fossils alone to claim a new species...
...figuring out how they arose, how they were related and what they evolved into--those that weren't evolutionary dead ends--has proved elusive. Not only is the fossil record full of holes, but the hominid species from eastern Africa haven't shown up in southern Africa, and vice versa. A remarkably preserved skeleton found in South Africa's Sterkfontein cave could change all that. Believed to be at least 3.3 million years old, the bones may belong to A. afarensis, making it the first of Lucy's species uncovered in that area. But the skeleton hasn't been fully...
...characteristics wasn't precisely what the experts expected--they were looking to see smaller, more specialized teeth and a larger braincase. So they named their hominid Australopithecus garhi (garhi means surprise in Afar). But the skull's intermediate anatomy and its age--about 2.5 million years--put it midway in both time and form between the most recent A. afarensis and the oldest known fossils of our own genus...
Whoever did it, the creation of technology gave its inventors an astonishing advantage over other hominid species. Stone hammers and blades let them exploit carcasses left behind by other predators and permitted them to shift to an energy-rich, high-fat diet. "That," asserts Asfaw, "leads to all kinds of evolutionary consequences...
...erectus was also the first hominid to emigrate from Africa, at least 1.8 million years ago, spreading all the way to China and Indonesia. Then, at some point--for reasons still mysterious--the lineage diverged, with one branch leading to Neanderthals and another to modern humans...