Archaeology/Anthropology: Aegyptopithecus

Searching for the Missing Link.

In the early 1960s British paleontologist Louis S. B. Leaky was searching in Kenya for the five-million-year-old missing link, an early ancestor of man from whom evolved one line of great apes and another line leading to man himself. A much older ancestor was discovered by Dr. Grant E. Meyer and Dr. Elwyn L. Simons of Yale's Peabody Museum.

A Skull Found.

The Yale expeditions started in 1961 in the Fayum desert of Egypt, about sixty miles south of Cairo. The area includes ancient lava flows. (There are no active volcanoes there now.) As wind and water eroded the lava, various remains were exposed. In the mid 1960s Meyer spotted a small bone sticking out of the lava about three hundred feet below the uppermost part of the lava flow. He carefully removed it, rock and all, and sent the entire formation back to Yale. There Simons carefully removed the rock and found an almost-intact...

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