Word: skulling
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That's why a series of discoveries presented last week in the journal Science has paleontologists in such a stir. An international expedition working in Ethiopia found a partial skull of a new species of human ancestor from 2.5 million years ago, right in the middle of the gap. They also discovered evidence that someone was using tools to butcher animals in the same location at approximately the same time. And they found fossil arm, leg and foot bones that will provide experts with important clues about how human ancestors were built in those days. Exclaims anatomist Alan Walker...
...knows what it all means yet. To start with, the researchers are not quite certain how the three discoveries relate to one another. The new species, for example, which the researchers call Australopithecus garhi (garhi means surprise in the Afar language), was identified on the basis of a fragmentary skull with a complete upper jaw full of unusually large teeth that was excavated from the arid, rocky ground of Ethiopia's Middle Awash region near the village of Bouri. When the paleontologists looked closely at the skull, they were shocked. The combination of teeth and bones clearly came from...
...foot bones were discovered in the same geological layer but some 900 ft. away from the skull and teeth. Without physical proximity to link the two finds, and without teeth for comparison, the paleontologists can't be sure that they are from the same species. But like the skull, these fossils show a mix of primitive and advanced traits. Australopithecus afarensis, which lived between 3.6 million and 2.9 million years ago, had forearms that were long compared with its legs, while Homo erectus, which appeared about 1.7 million years ago, had shortened forearms and longer legs, more like modern humans...
...think of The Big Lebowski's Walter and The Dude solemnly scattering their friend's ashes from a Quaker Oats box, into the wind. Thus DeGeneres' Pompano wolfs a corndog while questioning the distraught wife of the murdered. Or Billings at an autopsy, blood-sprayed by a being-buzzawed skull, protesting, absurdly, "Whoa, whoa, whoa" as if it were kids with a Super Soaker...
...Serbian twilight, they took us to see Slobodan Milosevic in his presidential residence. He had reddish, piggy eyes set in a big round head. He wore a brush cut that looked like static electricity firing up from his pink skull. Milosevic settled complacently onto a sofa, with Wiesel on his right, and cocked one leg onto the cushion, showing an expanse of hairless, pale calf above his black sock...