The nearly complete fossil of a 4.4-million-year-old human ancestor, a female dubbed "Ardi," is rewriting the story of human origins, paleontologists reported Thursday.
The analysis of Ardipithecus ramidus (it means "root of the ground ape"), reported in the journal Science, changes the notion that humans and chimps, our closest genetic cousins, both trace their lineage to a creature that was more like today's chimp. Rather, the research suggests that their common ancestor was a walking forest forager more cooperative in nature than the competitive, aggressive chimp and that chimps were an evolutionary offshoot of this creature.

So that could mean that while humans didn't diverge much from their evolutionary ancestors, "chimps and gorillas look like really special evolutionary outcomes," says Science study author Owen Lovejoy of Ohio's Kent State University.

The species was first discovered in fragments in 1992. The new analysis suggests our predecessors lacked tusk-like canines to brawl with, or hand-like feet to swing from trees, dashing the popular image of a chimp-like start for homo sapiens.

"We're going to have to rewrite the textbooks on human origins," Lovejoy says. The 47-member team published 11 reports of this fossil and on parts of at least 36 related ones found in Ethiopia's Afar Rift over 17 years of investigation.

"The find itself is extraordinary, as were the enormous labors that went into the reconstruction of a skeleton shattered almost beyond repair, and particularly the skull," says paleontologist David Pilbeam of Harvard, who was not on the study team. Ardi looks like a precursor to "Lucy," of the prehuman species Australopithecus afarensis, from 3.2 million years ago, he says.

A female, Ardi weighed about 110 pounds and walked upright on flat feet with a grasping big toe in a broken woodland setting. Mostly a plant eater, she was a "careful climber" of trees, says study leader Tim White of the University of California-Berkeley, with flexible hands and a brain about a quarter the size of a human's. "We can't say this species was a direct ancestor of modern humans, so we have to be careful. But it suggests that the direction of early hominids was away from the chimp."

Lovejoy says the fossil's lack of sharp canines suggests male ramiduses cooperated in foraging rather than competing for females relentlessly as chimps do today. Instead, he argues, these early human ancestors probably foraged for food with each other, with males and females of roughly the same size (rather than the large dominant males seen in gorilla and chimps) forming pairs.

"It is often assumed that we humans are selfish, competitive and warlike by nature, because our relatives the chimpanzees are," says primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, author of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. "Competition is obviously never absent, but ancestral models need to move away from the excessive emphasis on aggression and war."

Pilbeam, however, calls the evidence for cooperative foraging and paired couples "unpersuasive," based simply on the fossils.

"With Ardipithecus, we have to bear in mind this was a species that lived 4.4 million years ago, and a lot has happened since then in human evolution, when it comes to behavior," White says.

Still, he says, the finds point to humans originating from a primitive ape, one that moved to broken woodlands, rather than the jungle today ruled by chimps and gorillas, and then evolved to a walking hominid that favored open terrain, eventually spreading throughout Africa and today, worldwide.


'You start out wrinkled and you cry...you end up wrinkled and you die.'

This pretty much explains everything.

Firstly it explains how the rational, level headed and cooperative of today's society have origins back to the newly discovered Ardipithecus.

Secondly, it shows how an offshoot to a more chimp-like creature can occur (explaining the existence of George Bush and religious people in general).

I do jest of course. The story is fascinating as shown by this statement:

Competition is obviously never absent, but ancestral models need to move away from the excessive emphasis on aggression and war.

If it is shown that the more peaceful and cooperative hominids got much further evolutionary wise, technologically wise, spiritually and everything else, then all we truly should be saying - in every sense - is GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.