Word: ramapithecus
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Other researchers were adding to the evolutionary mosaic. In 1969, after re-evaluating the fragmentary remains of a monkey-size creature called Ramapithecus ?found in India's Siwalik Hills and first described by Yale Paleontologist G.E. Lewis is in 1934?Elwyn Simons, then at Yale, and his former student David Pilbeam became convinced that this creature too was an ancestor. They noted that his teeth were far closer to those of other hominids (manlike creatures) than to those of apes. Indeed, says Simons, 47, who now heads the Duke University Center for the Study of Primate Biology and History...
...ancestors of today's great apes?the gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, which are man's closest living cousins. Another produced a creature called Gigantopithecus, a huge ground ape that roamed the valleys of Asia for a few million years before it became extinct. A third branch gave rise to Ramapithecus, which most anthropologists believe was a distant ancestor...
...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...
...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...