Meet your oldest cousin … Ardi

Posted: October 3, 2009 in Information

Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID (AP) – 2 days ago

WASHINGTON — The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about “Ardi,” a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, 4-foot female roamed forests a million years before the famous Lucy, long studied as the earliest skeleton of a human ancestor.

This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University.

Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

“This is not that common ancestor, but it’s the closest we have ever been able to come,” said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, White said in a telephone interview.

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Comments
  1. VananhPham says:

    OH!! Imagine if we had evolve on the wrong side of the tree . . .

  2. gabrielaflores says:

    hmm i wonder what it would have been like if they lived forever, imagine sitting next to “ardi”?lol…weird!

    • chelseaperiod5 says:

      I’d probably find it quite fasinating, I mean think about it – sitting next to the “oldest” think alive (dead now but back then)…& holy crap, 6-7 million years old!! eebis jeebis. (: lol

      Oh, and what was with the part where is played the skeletol walking, was that based off from the remains, or what they’ve found?? O_o

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