Word: ramapithecus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...After reading "The Age of Man" [Aug. 29], I happened to pick up G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and read his perceptive comment on another famous reconstruction by paleontologists -Pithecanthropus. Every word of it could be applied to Ramapithecus and the Yale investigators who have reconstructed him from "no more than partial jawbones and a few teeth...
...bones belonged to an extinct primate that paleontologists call Ramapithecus (the Latin word for ape, with a bow to the Indian god Rama). Scientists already knew that the creature lived in Asia and Africa 8,000,000 to 15 million years ago. But they have never known exactly where to place him on the evolutionary ladder. Did he belong to the family of apes? Or was he already a member of the family of man? The questions puzzled Yale Paleontologist Elwyn L. Simons, and his former student, David R. Pilbeam, both of whom had strongly suspected for some time that...
...making their persuasive case for Ramapithecus as the first hominid, Simons and Pilbeam dispute a competing claim by the Kenyan anthropologist, Louis Leakey. Two years ago Leakey announced that 20 million-year-old fossils that he had discovered near Africa's Lake Victoria and dubbed Kenyapithecus africanus belonged to the earliest known manlike creature (TIME, Feb. 3, 1967). After applying their dental tests' to casts of Leakey's prehistoric fragments, the Yalemen decided that Kenyapithecus lacked the characteristics of early man. Though Leakey still insists that Kenyapithecus is a hominid, most other scientists now believe that...
...identification of Ramapithecus has even more profound implications to paleontologists. If he is indeed a hominid, Rama would be the direct predecessor of a creature called Australopithecus (southern ape), who, in turn, has long been accepted by scientists as being man's most immediate ancestor among the primates. Unlike the ape: who lived with him in East Africa, the short (just over 4 ft.), heavy-jawed man ape, Australopithecus, stood erect, eating meat as well as fruits and vegetables and was probably the first creature to make and use tools of stone.* Until recently, most paleontologists were certain that...