INTRODUCING ARDI: This early hominid is more than a million years older than famed Lucy and presents a wealth of new information--and speculation--about how humans first embarked on our long evolutionary journey.And the best name they could come up with was "Ardi?"
Scientific American[Read more.]
October 1, 2009
Fifteen years in the making, a dossier of papers on "Ardi" published in Science suggest that like humans, chimpanzees have undergone substantial evolutionary change
The first full analysis of a 4.4-million-year-old early human paints a clearer picture of what the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may have looked like, which is not, after all, that much like a chimp at all. The ancient Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi", as the most complete female specimen is known) is described in 11 research papers published online today in Science. The prodigious research effort combines Ardi's fossils with those from many other Ar. ramidus individuals—both male and female—found near the Awash River in the Afar Rift region of Ethiopia.
Ar. ramidus, although likely millions of years more recent than the so-called missing link between chimpanzees and humans, represents "coming as close as we've ever come to that last common ancestor," Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the studies' lead authors, said in a recorded interview for Science.
1 comments:
I think its cool that we are doing this wow its really fun..
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