Ask the Family; Human Evolution  

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Jenis: Article from Bulletin/Magazine
Dalam koleksi: The Economist (http://search.proquest.com/) vol. 404 no. 8797 (Aug. 2012), page 66.
Topik: Subject; Hominids; Evolution; Paleontology; Research; International

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: EE29.73 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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One of the oddest things about Homo sapiens is that he is alone. Though storytellers have filled the world with imaginary hominids--from woodland pixies to mountain giants--no sign of the real thing has ever been seen. But that was not true in the past. As recently as 40,000 years ago there were three other species of human on Earth: Neanderthals in Europe, the "hobbits" of Flores, in Indonesia, and a recently discovered and still mysterious group of creatures called the Denisovans, who lived in Central Asia. And now there is evidence that similar diversity existed earlier in human history, a little under 2m years ago, in Africa. This evidence, just published in Nature, has been provided by a team led by Meave Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya. Dr Leakey is a member of an illustrious palaeontological clan. Her husband, Richard, discovered in 1967 that the area around Lake Turkana is a good place to look for human fossils and made many important finds there; Richard's parents, Louis and Mary, had earlier been responsible for showing the same was true of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania; and in 1999 Dr Leakey herself found a new species of hominid, called Kenyanthropus platyops. At 3.5m years old Kenyanthropus predates Homo, the genus to which modern humans belong. Her latest discoveries, however, add to that genus, too.

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