Humanlike Features Discovered In 4.4M-Year-Old Ardipithecus Skull
Humanlike Features Discovered In 4.4M-Year-Old Ardipithecus Skull
January 7, 2014
The 4.4-million-year-old African species Ardipithecus ramidus, or “Ardi,” is the focus of one of the most hotly debated issues in current human origins research. Scientists want to know how Ardi, an unusual primate, is related to the human lineage.
The study, published in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows that although Ardi possessed a tiny brain and a grasping big toe for climbing trees – the primate had small, humanlike canine teeth and an upper pelvis modified for bipedal walking on the ground.
Where this mixture of features places Ardi on the tree of human and ape relations remains an uncertainty. Scientists question whether Ardi was an ape with a few humanlike features retained from an ancestor near in time — between 6 and 8 million years ago, according to DNA evidence — to the split between the chimpanzee and human lines, or perhaps a true relative of the human line that had yet to shed many signs of its remote tree-dwelling ancestry.
Arizona State University (ASU) paleoanthropologist William Kimbel, director of the ASU Institute of Human Origins, collaborated with Gen Suwa (University of Tokyo Museum), Berhane Asfaw (Rift Valley Research Service, Addis Ababa), Yoel Rak (Tel Aviv University), and Tim White (University of California at Berkeley).
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http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113040254/ardipithecus-ramidus-skull-humanlike-canine-teeth-010714/#f6HwjMDcPf2Mbke5.99