Free Republic

Fossil fragments of a face as well as teeth were reassembled to produce the most complete cranium of a human ancestor from this time in the Horn of Africa. (Credit: Karen L. Baab. Scans provided by National Museum of Ethiopia. Photographs courtesy of M. Rogers and G. Suwa.) ================================================================= 1.6-Million-Year-Old Fossil Combines Homo habilis Face With Homo erectus Brow In A Nutshell * What did researchers find? A 1.6-to-1.5-million-year-old skull from Ethiopia combines features from two different stages of human evolution. The braincase and brow ridge match Homo erectus, but the face, teeth, and brain size look more like the...

...It's not the first time stone tools have been found with fossils of Paranthropus, a genus with several species that lived from about 2.8 million to 1.2 million years ago across Africa. In 1955, Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the Nutcracker Man, a skull with a robust jaw and teeth now classified as Paranthropus boisei, in the same 1.8-million-year-old layer of sediments as Oldowan tools. But Mary Leakey soon found a skull of Homo habilis (Latin for "handyman") in the same layer and thought that species, in our own genus, was a better fit as the principal toolmaker. Paranthropus, with...

Richard Leakey, the world-renowned paleoanthropologist-turned-conservationist, has died at 77. The death of the native Kenyan was announced late Sunday by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. A cause of death was not given. Leakey, whose famous parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, made profound contributions to the understanding of human evolution through key fossil finds of early hominids, also made important discoveries of his own in the field. In 1981, he gained public notoriety as the presenter in a BBC television series called The Making of Mankind. By the late 1980s, however, he had shifted his focus, stepping in as head of the...