Ardi

News came out last week of an incredible discovery. It was announced that scientists in Ethiopia had discovered one of our oldest ever ancestors, bringing us ever closer to the elusive so-called “missing link”, the last common ancestor that we shared with modern apes. Scientists have long being trying to find out what the first hominids looked like, and now they finally have an answer.

Ardi

Named Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, the discovery is the oldest ever in the hominid branch and is being hailed by many as the most important discovery of our time. The previous most important find was the skeleton known as Lucy, who was 3.2 million years old, making Ardi over a million years older. It is thought that our last common ancestor with the apes lived about six or seven million years ago.

Discovery

Ardi was discovered in Afar, a region of the Great Rift Valley in northeast Ethiopia. This is only about 46 miles away from the site where Lucy was discovered. The fossils were actually found way back in 1994, and it is only now that we are hearing about it. This is because it took three years for scientists to put all the 125 fragments together, and a further 13 years to analyse them. The fossils were in such a bad shape that a microscope and needle were needed to extract them from the rock.

Of particular importance were the discovery of almost complete foot and hand bones, which are incredibly rare to find in any hominid fossil. That this find was so old made it even more remarkable.

Characteristics

Ardi was about four feet tall and weighed about nine stone, making it twice the weight of Lucy and about a foot taller as well. It had a brain slightly bigger than a modern chimp’s, although smaller than Lucy’s. It walked with a stoop, and was a good climber, as implied through its outward–pointing big toe and long arms. It survived on a diet of leaves, fruit and small mammals.

Questions

The discovery of Ardi has raised lots of questions relating to our evolutionary path. The biggest problem to arise with the discovery is the light it sheds on why we began to walk on two feet in the first place. It had long been theorised that it was our move out of the forests and onto the savannahs that led to this development, but Ardi lived in a heavily forested area.

The teeth also pose further questions. As other male teeth were also found at the site, scientists could see that both males and females had similar sized teeth. In modern apes, the males bare their teeth in fights, which was not done by Ardi. This suggests that the male was a more parental figure and shows a very early reduction in the canine tooth.

Whatever the further mysteries posed by the discovery of Ardi, it helps us to get closer to the missing link, and each new discovery teaches us even more about our origins. Ethiopia is proving to be a rich source of discoveries, and who knows what else lies in wait beneath the stone to shed light on our origins.