She discovered the skull of Proconsul africanus, an apelike ancestor of both apes and early humans that lived about 25 million years ago.

The 2.5 million-year-old creature, dubbed Australopithecus garhi , evidently used stone tools to carve up the animals it killed and had much bigger teeth than its apelike ancestors.

The first two sentences of the caption to the illustration read (with emphasis added), "What were the stages of man's long march from apelike ancestors to ?

This arrangement suggests that this part of the hand blueprint came from apelike ancestors five million to six million years ago.

Now a team of French scientists has rebuilt a virus that infected our apelike ancestors several million years ago.

These apelike ancestors, the scientists noted, were walking almost three million years before they became runners and began to assume more modern physiques.

In our evolutionary ascent from an apelike ancestor, we gained our most prized possession, the mental abilities underlying language.

Some of the worriers concentrate on apelike ancestors, showing a lack of vision.

Moreover, he suggests, the upright posture adopted by early hominids - humans' apelike ancestors - as long as two million years ago would have facilitated hand-based communication.

Most scientists agree that modern man evolved from apelike ancestors in a process that began millions of years ago.