nightflier
10-01-2009, 12:57 PM
This is certainly a significant achievement:
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Hominid creature Ardipithecus ramidus "Ardi" sets a new milestone for anthropology.
International scientists have assembled the partial skeleton of a pre-human who lived 4.4 million years ago during one of the earliest known periods of human evolution.
The scientists, led by UC Berkeley anthropologist Tim D. White, named their hominid creature Ardipithecus ramidus, and nicknamed her "Ardi" after the first of her bones were unearthed in the remote Afar desert of the Ethiopia and analyzed in 1992. Since then, they have learned increasingly more about Ardi and others like her whose legs, arms and skull show features that are part ape and part human.
During 17 years of repeated fossil-hunting expeditions in the region, the team found and recovered more than 150,000 fossil bones from the varied animals and plants that lived in Ardi's territory - as well as individual bones of some 36 other members of Ardi's line. They are announcing their discoveries today in a series to be published Friday in a special edition of the journal Science.
The habitat of Ardipithecus ramidus was a cool, verdant and spring-fed woodland of palms and fig trees later to be uplifted by volcanoes, the buried, and eroded into a floodplain again and again by rainfall over countless millennia.
Ardi, a 110-pound adult female less than four feet tall, whose foot bones showed she walked upright but flatfooted, and was apparently no knuckle-walker like her relatives the modern chimpanzees.
Her hands, still with their large, extended opposable thumbs, meant that evolution had retained from her ape-like ancestry the ability to climb and swing among the trees with ease.
Ardi and her kind are at least a million years older and much different from the famed and more recent "Lucy," the hominid that lived some 3.2 million years ago and was discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson in the desert only 45 miles north of the Ardi discovery site.
The roadless desert site where White and his co-leader, Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Ethiopia, have been working with their colleagues since 1992 lies near the tiny village of Aramis along Ethiopia's Awash river, about 140 miles northeast of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.
The new discoveries are being reported in 11 separate papers in Science by a total of 47 authors from around the world.
"This is an extraordinary achievement," said David Pilbeam, a noted Harvard anthropologist who was not connected with any of the research teams.
In an e-mail, Pilbeam called it "one of the most important discoveries for human evolution. The find itself is extraordinary, as were the enormous labors that went into the reconstruction of a skeleton shattered almost beyond repair."
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Copyright 2009 SF Chronicle
(10-01) 09:59 PDT SAN FRANCISCO
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Hominid creature Ardipithecus ramidus "Ardi" sets a new milestone for anthropology.
International scientists have assembled the partial skeleton of a pre-human who lived 4.4 million years ago during one of the earliest known periods of human evolution.
The scientists, led by UC Berkeley anthropologist Tim D. White, named their hominid creature Ardipithecus ramidus, and nicknamed her "Ardi" after the first of her bones were unearthed in the remote Afar desert of the Ethiopia and analyzed in 1992. Since then, they have learned increasingly more about Ardi and others like her whose legs, arms and skull show features that are part ape and part human.
During 17 years of repeated fossil-hunting expeditions in the region, the team found and recovered more than 150,000 fossil bones from the varied animals and plants that lived in Ardi's territory - as well as individual bones of some 36 other members of Ardi's line. They are announcing their discoveries today in a series to be published Friday in a special edition of the journal Science.
The habitat of Ardipithecus ramidus was a cool, verdant and spring-fed woodland of palms and fig trees later to be uplifted by volcanoes, the buried, and eroded into a floodplain again and again by rainfall over countless millennia.
Ardi, a 110-pound adult female less than four feet tall, whose foot bones showed she walked upright but flatfooted, and was apparently no knuckle-walker like her relatives the modern chimpanzees.
Her hands, still with their large, extended opposable thumbs, meant that evolution had retained from her ape-like ancestry the ability to climb and swing among the trees with ease.
Ardi and her kind are at least a million years older and much different from the famed and more recent "Lucy," the hominid that lived some 3.2 million years ago and was discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson in the desert only 45 miles north of the Ardi discovery site.
The roadless desert site where White and his co-leader, Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Ethiopia, have been working with their colleagues since 1992 lies near the tiny village of Aramis along Ethiopia's Awash river, about 140 miles northeast of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.
The new discoveries are being reported in 11 separate papers in Science by a total of 47 authors from around the world.
"This is an extraordinary achievement," said David Pilbeam, a noted Harvard anthropologist who was not connected with any of the research teams.
In an e-mail, Pilbeam called it "one of the most important discoveries for human evolution. The find itself is extraordinary, as were the enormous labors that went into the reconstruction of a skeleton shattered almost beyond repair."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2009 SF Chronicle
(10-01) 09:59 PDT SAN FRANCISCO