Three days later, on May 12, Amundsen, with Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile, set off from the same base in a semirigid airship and flew across the pole to Alaska, thus becoming the first to definitively reach the pole as well as the first to traverse the polar region.
His spiritual crisis reached its climax and the point of no return in 1872, when he definitively abandoned the project of becoming a minister and applied as a non-collegiate student at Cambridge.
While evidence for both sides of the "is everything everywhere?" debate mount up, it is becoming increasingly clear that current methods may be incapable of definitively answering this question.
In the last year, China succeeded in becoming only the third nation to put an astronaut into orbit, definitively signaling that it intends to break into the front rank of space explorers.
In the mid-1930s, smoking was becoming so common and lung cancer so prevalent that it was often impossible to definitively discern a statistical link between the two.
LUDWIGSHAFEN, Germany — "Artifact," the first ballet that William Forsythe created after becoming director of the Frankfurt Ballet in 1984, is a masterpiece, a work that definitively shows this choreographer as the most influential practitioner of the art form since Balanchine.
That paved the way for the archaeological exploration and preservation of the site, but it also definitively ended ancient Palmyra's habitation as well as the use of the Temple of Baal, which over the centuries had transformed into a Byzantine church, then a mosque, before eventually becoming part of the village where Ms. Kuntar's mother was born.
To be sure, Cox didn't actually say that one skull was definitively ancestral to the next, but there was a definite sense of post-hoc-ery going on, as human beings adapted to each new environment by expanding their brains, rather than (say) expanding their livers, or going somewhere else, or becoming extinct.
