charles_darwin

Chronology
1974 24 November: A team led by Donald Johanson
finds the oldest hominid skeleton in the Afar region
of Northern Ethiopia. The fossil, classified
Australopithecus afarensis and nicknamed ‘‘Lucy,’’ is
3.2 million years old.
(+92)
1976 Richard Dawkins publishes The Selfish Gene; the
book popularizes the work of evolutionary
biologists.
1978 July–August: A team led by Mary Leakey discovers
a series of Australopithecus footprints near Laetoli
in Tanzania: this discovery provides evidence that
Australopithecines walked upright. The footprints
are over 3.6 million years old and are made by
hominids similar to ‘‘Lucy.’’
(+94)
(+96)
1997 23 February: Announcement of the successful (+114)
cloning of ‘‘Dolly,’’ a sheep, by a team of scientists at
the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, led
by Ian Wilmut.
2000 26 June: Joint announcement at the White House
by the Human Genome Project and Celera
Genomics that the human genome has been
mapped.
2001 15–16 February: Results published by the Human
Genome Project in the journal Nature and Celera
Genomics in the journal Science show that the
human genome contains approximately 30,000
genes, much fewer than the 100,000 estimated by
most scientists.
(+118)
(+119)
2003 June: A team that includes the U.C. Berkeley
anthropologist Timothy White announces that it
has discovered the skeletal head of the oldest homo
sapiens in Ethiopia in a dig in 2002.
(+121)
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