People: Jan. 20, 1967

Two years ago, in a dry wash known as Kanapoi in Kenya, Harvard Paleontologist Bryan Patterson was poking around for old bones when he came upon what looked like a routine fragment. "I said to myself, 'Ho hum, there's another knuckle bone,' " Patterson told a news conference in Cambridge, Mass., last week. Actually, it was a bit of serendipity. After laboratory analysis of the radioactive decay in the lava surrounding the bone, Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology determined that the bone must be 2,500,000 years old. Since it is a piece of...

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