Archaeologica.org

Human-like fossil find is breakthrough of the year


The team slowly reconstructed what "Ardi" would have looked like

The discovery of a fossilised skeleton that has become a "central character in the story of human evolution" has been named the science breakthrough of 2009.
The 4.4 million year old creature, that may be a human ancestor, was first described in a series of papers in the journal Science in October.
It has now been recognised by the journal's editors as the most important scientific accomplishment of this year.

The first fossils of the species, Ardipithecus ramidus, were unearthed in 1994. Scientists recognised their importance immediately.
But the very poor condition of the ancient bones meant that it took researchers 15 years to excavate and analyse them.


It's not a chimp. It's not a human. It shows us what we used to be
Professor Tim White
University of California, Berkeley

The most important thing to emerge from that excavation was the partial skeleton of a female creature, which has now been nicknamed "Ardi".
An international team of scientists unveiled the skeleton in a series of scientific papers published in Science in October.
Their careful examination of its skull, teeth, pelvis, hands and feet revealed that Ardi shared a mixture of "primitive" traits shared with its predecessors, and "derived" features, which it shared with later hominids, or human-like creatures.
It shared some of these derived features with humans.

Professor Tim White from the University of California, Berkeley in the US, was one of the lead scientists working on the project.
"This is not an ordinary fossil. It's not a chimp. It's not a human. It shows us what we used to be," he told Science Magazine at the time the research was published.
One of his team's key conclusions was that Ardi walked upright. This was based on the painstaking reassembly of its very badly crushed pelvis, which the scientists said had a shape that would have allowed Ardi to balance on one leg at a time.

Evolution debate
Professor White said that some researchers had been sceptical about these conclusions.
"Some people have looked at the pelvis and said, 'my gosh, that's fairly squashed. Are you sure you knew how to put it together correctly?' So we're responding to that," he told Science magazine.

Ardipithecus was even more primitive than the famous "Lucy" fossil - a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus skeleton that was discovered in 1974.
Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum in London said that Ardi was likely "a remnant of a more ancient stage of human evolution" than Lucy.
"[It was] closer in many ways to the ancestor we shared with our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, more than six million years ago," he said.

The editor-in-chief of Science said that the Ardipithecus research represented a "culmination of 15 years of painstaking, highly collaborative research by 47 scientists of diverse expertise from nine nations."

Minimalist wrote:The creationists will go nuts!

Rokcet Scientist wrote:Whatever happened to Sahelanthropus Tchadensis? Or Orrorin Tugenensis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahelanthropus_tchadensis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrorin
Have they been written out of the script already?

White and his colleagues assembled it to mark the place where they first found traces, in 1994, of “Ardi,” a female who lived 4.4 million years ago. Her skeleton has been described as one of the most important discoveries of the past century, and she is changing basic ideas about how our earliest ancestors looked and moved.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... z0gWmDJw2d