Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found

Source: AP News


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.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091001/ap_on_sc/us_sci_before_lucy

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More evidence for Science about the origin of human kind..

..I thought it was an article about old TV shows.

Ardi = Ardipithecus ramidus

Lucy = Australopithecus afarensis

Same genus but different species Lucy would have had at least some of the same DNA as Ardi but how much is hard to say.

Ardipithecus is a genus and Australopithecus is a genus. A. ramidus may be ancestral to A. afarensis or an unrelated hominid.

Sounds like she has a nice personality too.

:shrug:

;-)

puzzle together.

Oh wait...she's only 4' tall.

premieres this Sunday on the Discovery Channel.
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-schedules/series.html?paid=1.16160.25585.33868.1

Oct 11, 9:00 pm
(120 minutes)

Discovering Ardi
Episode 1
TV-PG

Ardipithecus - a 4.4-million year old fossil from Ethiopia - unlocks secrets to our human past. "Discovering Ardi" chronicles 17 years of research by an international team of scientists on the world?s oldest hominid skeleton.

Oct 12, 12:00 am
(120 minutes)

Discovering Ardi
Episode 1
TV-PG

Ardipithecus - a 4.4-million year old fossil from Ethiopia - unlocks secrets to our human past. "Discovering Ardi" chronicles 17 years of research by an international team of scientists on the world?s oldest hominid skeleton.

Oct 15, 9:00 pm
(120 minutes)

Discovering Ardi
Episode 1
TV-PG

Ardipithecus - a 4.4-million year old fossil from Ethiopia - unlocks secrets to our human past. "Discovering Ardi" chronicles 17 years of research by an international team of scientists on the world?s oldest hominid skeleton.

Oct 16, 12:00 am
(120 minutes)

Discovering Ardi
Episode 1
TV-PG

Ardipithecus - a 4.4-million year old fossil from Ethiopia - unlocks secrets to our human past. "Discovering Ardi" chronicles 17 years of research by an international team of scientists on the world?s oldest hominid skeleton.

:hug: