Evolutionary History of Apes

Last night, I watched the Discovery Channel special on "Ardi." It brought up some interesting things I hadn't known until about a week or so ago, namely: "Knuckle-walking" in chimps appears to be an evolved trait from after we split, hominids evolved in forrested areas, and in the just plain cool category, Ardi was bipedal, but still had grasping feet.One of the threads throughout the special was trying to push human ancestry back to the common ancestor with chimps, but as with Lucy, finding that Ardi was bipedal means it's even farther back.That got me thinking, what is the fossil record for Chimps and/or the other great apes? We seem to be trying to push our ancestor's back to a common one with chimps, but how far back do they have for chimps? Is it possible we've found our last common ancestor, but until we can link it in time with proto-hominid remains, we just don't know yet?I'm not sure where this would go, and I've never started a new thread since the "Proposed New Topics" strategy began, so if I need to change it, let me know.

Thread copied to the Evolutionary History of Apes thread in the Biological Evolution forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.