Word: hominids
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...find lays to rest a long-standing dispute about another breed of hominid, the Neanderthals. "It's now clear," says White, "that there were anatomically modern humans in Africa long before there were classic Neanderthals in Europe." This means that the more primitive Neanderthals could not, as some have argued, have been our ancestors. They were almost certainly a side branch on the evolutionary tree, and that branch died out some 30,000 years...
Another controversy has to do with where modern humans first appeared. Everyone agrees that a hominid called Homo erectus left its African home some 2 million years ago to populate the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Long after that, argues one camp, Homo sapiens evolved, also in Africa, and began a second exodus. In contrast to this out-of-Africa scenario, the so-called multiregionalists say there was no second sojourn. The far-flung Homo erectus communities and their descendants, the multiregionalists believe, could have interbred enough that Homo sapiens appeared pretty much everywhere at once...
...Rover, accompanied by her two Dalmatians. She spent the morning crawling along the slope of the nearby gorge but found very little until just before noon, when she noticed a scrap of enormously thick bone protruding from beneath the surface. She instantly realized that it was part of a hominid skull--and that two teeth were embedded in the rock just above it. Elated, she 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...
...recall ever seeing my parents in such high spirits. The skull that my mother recovered was in many pieces, but she and my father were able to piece it back together. It was the first really significant find at Olduvai; indeed, it was the 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...
Finding Toumai Man, the oldest hominid, in Chad [PALEONTOLOGY, July 22] fits in well with the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed by paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould. [The theory explains why new species, rather than evolving gradually over millions of years, seem to suddenly appear in the fossil record, punctuating long periods of species stability, or equilibrium.] The Toumai fossil could have been a member of a peripherally isolated community that evolved into our oldest ancestors. You reported that several modern-looking hominids coexisted, and this also jibes with the introduction of members of an isolated community into...