Meet Ardi
October 10th 2009 04:20
The recent stunning unveiling of research on the hominid Ardipithecus ramidus sheds new light on the history of the lineage from which humanity arose. The specimen, which is sure to rob Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy") of some of its glory now that it has been described, has been especially noted for the anatomical surprises it packs. Ar. ramidus appears to have been well suited to life on the ground as well as in the trees, and was far less like a chimpanzee than we might have anticipated. At 4.4 million years old, "Ardi", a specimen significantly more well preserved than Lucy, is up to several million years younger than the last common ancestor of humans and chimps.
This means that we aren't actually seeing what that ancestor looked like (and, it should be noted, in palaeontology we aren't ever concerned with ancestors per se, but with what are known as collateral ancestors; ancestors, even if found, can not be positively identified as such, due to the branching nature of evolution. We can, however, find fossils of the sort we would expect to find given evolution; that is, fossils with a mosaic of features from nominally related taxa), but we can at least say that the features Ardi has are indicative of the sorts of things that the ancestor likely possessed, since she is closer to it. Over at Science, there are 11 scientific journal papers you can download that deal with Ardi. The specimen was actually discovered 15 years ago, by the way.
Here is an excellent overview of Ardi from Scientific American. An excerpt from that article:
"Among the surprises: Ardi's jaw and limbs show she was a forest-dwelling omnivore, not a fruit-eater like today's chimps or an open savanna–dweller like other early hominids. Ardi had a brain about the size of a modern chimp's relative to body size (about a third the size of a modern human's). And Ar. ramidus's foot is strikingly unlike that of a modern chimpanzee, the authors of another paper (led by Lovejoy) explain."
Depiction of Ardi. Source: Scientific American. Illustrated by J. H. Matternes
This means that we aren't actually seeing what that ancestor looked like (and, it should be noted, in palaeontology we aren't ever concerned with ancestors per se, but with what are known as collateral ancestors; ancestors, even if found, can not be positively identified as such, due to the branching nature of evolution. We can, however, find fossils of the sort we would expect to find given evolution; that is, fossils with a mosaic of features from nominally related taxa), but we can at least say that the features Ardi has are indicative of the sorts of things that the ancestor likely possessed, since she is closer to it. Over at Science, there are 11 scientific journal papers you can download that deal with Ardi. The specimen was actually discovered 15 years ago, by the way.
Here is an excellent overview of Ardi from Scientific American. An excerpt from that article:
"Among the surprises: Ardi's jaw and limbs show she was a forest-dwelling omnivore, not a fruit-eater like today's chimps or an open savanna–dweller like other early hominids. Ardi had a brain about the size of a modern chimp's relative to body size (about a third the size of a modern human's). And Ar. ramidus's foot is strikingly unlike that of a modern chimpanzee, the authors of another paper (led by Lovejoy) explain."
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