Word: prehumans
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Mary, estranged from Louis in later years, blossomed as a scientist. It was she who, at Laetoli in 1978, led the team that found the earliest known prehuman footprints, from 3.6 million years ago. She continues her research in retirement...
Among fellow anthropologists, Britain's L.S.B. Leakey is revered-with reservations. Since 1931 he has been excavating the Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, which is perhaps the richest known deposit of human and prehuman fossils. The site of Leakey's excavations was once a small lake that gradually filled and dried up, preserving in stone the bones of many creatures, some of them primates, that lived on its shores. Much later, a river cut a canyon through the lake bed, bringing the bones to light...
...Leakey wants to call this up-and-coming pygmy Homo habilis, or skillful man, and recognize him as a direct ancestor of modern man. He thinks that a prehuman creature called Kenyapithecus lived in East Africa 12 million years ago and evolved into Homo habilis and at least two other different types, notably Australopithecus and erectus, a near man that includes both Java and Peking man. From Homo habilis, Leakey believes, are descended both Neanderthal man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens). His theory, if correct, would trace man's ancestry back to the Pliocene...
...many anthropologists accept this genealogy in its entirety. Some of them argue that Dr. Leakey's newfound fossils are examples of prehuman creatures that happen to look fairly manlike. Others agree that they are extremely interesting but maintain that they are too fragmentary to assign a definite place in the primate family tree. Leakey's Homo habilis may well become established as an ancestral man-if he is not first demoted to an apeman, as was Zinjanthropus...
...Inheritors, by William Golding. A grimly provocative imagination makes this story of a doomed prehuman Neanderthal tribe a fitting successor to the author's earlier and frightening Lord of the Flies...