Word: hominids
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...second son of famed paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, Richard first burst into global prominence in 1972 when his team in Kenya unearthed a beautifully preserved 1.9 million-year-old skull of Homo habilis, an early hominid species first discovered by his parents. Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, observes that the younger Leakey has more than his share of luck. "Louis Leakey had to crawl over hot rocky outcrops for 30 years before he found anything of importance; Richard struck gold from the start." Roger Lewin, collaborator on three...
...Whoa. This is a hominid," crowed Anthropologist Tim White when he spotted the first bone fragment, a portion of an elbow, lying on a layer of sand. Looking down, Expedition Leader Donald Johanson shouted, "There's part of a humerus right next to it!" That July 1986 find in Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge marked the beginning of a startling discovery that was formally unveiled last week by White and Johanson. The team of ten U.S. and Tanzanian scientists unearthed 302 fossil bones and teeth that have yielded a more complete picture of modern humans' earliest direct ancestor, Homo habilis...
...body build. The remains, described in the British journal Nature last week, belong to a creature that lived about 1.8 million years ago and stood no more than 3 1/2 feet tall. Says Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley: "This may be the smallest hominid ever found...
...inch jawbone fragment that was unearthed dates back five million years--a million years earlier than any other previously discovered hominid, or member of the human family...
Just as startling as the hominid's size is its anatomical similarity to modern man. Says Leakey: "Those who want to have a funny-looking thing as an ancestor 1½ million years ago will be disappointed. He's very human. That's what's so exciting. There were real people wandering about then." -By Jamie Murphy. Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington and Maryame Rollers/Nairobi