Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago. The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia's harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. "It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn't look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between." Ardi Surrounded by Family "This find is far more important than Lucy," said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.Īnnounced at joint press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the analysis of the Ardipithecus ramidus bones will be published in a collection of papers tomorrow in a special edition of the journal Science, along with an avalanche of supporting materials published online. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior-long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors-is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.Īrdi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas. The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link-resembling something between humans and today's apes-would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton-assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus-belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago. Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor.
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