Word: hominids
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...Mary made what may have been her greatest find. Her team was re-exploring a site in Tanzania called Laetoli--40 years after Louis had incorrectly assumed that the absence of tools there implied that hominid fossils would not be found--when they discovered a trail of remarkably clear ancient hominid footprints impressed and preserved in volcanic ash. It was a stunning glimpse of the world 3.6 million years ago. If only Louis had lived...
...detailed scientific study of the Laetoli hominid fossils confirmed that they belonged to a new hominid species, best represented by the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton I had discovered four years earlier at Hadar, Ethiopia. When I presented these findings in May 1978 at a Nobel symposium in Sweden, Mary had already agreed to be one of the coauthors on the scientific paper defining the new species, Australopithecus afarensis. A few months later, however, when the paper was being printed, she cabled me demanding removal of her name. I respected her wishes and had the title page redone. Like...
...later ranged over an impressive expanse of land that included the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia and possibly Europe. But Homo erectus was no match for our species, the glamorous Homo sapiens, and not long after anatomically modern humans appeared some 200,000 years ago, the more primitive hominid died...
...more important, the discovery may help paleontologists finally figure out when and why the Australopithecus clan sprouted a new branch on the hominid tree. According to a leading theory, the trigger was a global cooling trend that began about 2.7 million years ago and transformed much of Africa's moist woodlands into dryer, more open savannah. Was the development of tools and a more upright stance an evolutionary strategy to cope with the rigors of the new environment? Perhaps. But until now nobody had found a Homo fossil that dated back anywhere near 2.7 million years...
This doesn't mean that paleontologists have found hominid bones with "Adam" stamped on them along with evidence that Adam disobeyed God, thus condemning the rest of us to lives of toil and hardship. But it does mean that this biblical story line, as transmuted by later thinkers into religious doctrine, has produced some ideas that resonate with modern Darwinian theory. In particular, the Christian doctrine of original sin makes more sense as evolutionary psychologists learn more about why people do bad things...