Ardi – a seven stone, four-foot tall female who roamed African forests 4.4million years ago- was the oldest member of the human family tree found so far, pre-dating the previous ancestor “Lucy” by a million years.
Her discovery, reported in October, sheds light on a crucial period when we were just leaving the trees.
Her skeleton, found in Ethiopia, promises to fill in gaps about how we became human and evolved from apes. It has already reversed some common assumptions of evolution.
Rather than humans evolving from chimps, the find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved together from another common, more ancient ancestor.
While she was not exactly this “missing link”, she was described as its “cousin”.
Naming Ardi – short for Ardipithecus ramidus or ‘root of the ground ape’ – as the Breakthrough of the Year, Science journal, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said it “changed the way we think about early human evolution”.
