On the front of The Indie today;
Meet the human ancestor who walked Earth 4 million years ago
Bones found in East Africa add a new chapter to the story of man's evolution, says Steve Connor
She stood 4ft tall but she was no lightweight — her muscular body weighed nearly eight stone. She could climb trees easily with the help of long arms, huge hands and grasping toes, but "Ardi" could also walk fully upright on two legs — the first known human ancestor with a bipedal gait.
With a hairy body and snout-like face, Ardi must have looked more ape than human when she roamed her woodland habitat in East Africa some 4.4 million years ago — except for her bipedalism. But Ardi's uncertain role in the story of human origins has now become clearer following an exhaustive investigation into the 110 fragments of fossilised bones belonging to her species.
It is now clear that Ardipithecus ramidus is the earliest unequivocal member of the long lineage extending to anatomically-modern humans, Homo sapiens, from the last common ancestral species we shared with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives whose DNA is 99 per cent similar to our own.
Much older than Lucy, this is a very interesting fossil. She was bipedal, but still had the opposable toes that Lucy and later hominids lacked. There are various other ways in which she was intermediate between hominids and more chimp-like apes.
Meet the human ancestor who walked Earth 4 million years ago | The Independent | The Independent
Interesting stuff.
Mutate and Survive
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Add the "(Ardipithecus ramidus)" to the topic title.
"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod
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